"The new Akira" proclaims the promotional blurb.
No, it's not. It had potential to be, in the end however there is more bad than good:
Overall not much to recommend it other than the occasional visual feast of a possible Future-Belgrade.
To end on a somewhat positive note: i prefer it to the last animation I watched: Advent Children! Technotise at least showed glimpses of promise.
No, it's not. It had potential to be, in the end however there is more bad than good:
- premise is sound: the idea of a machine-consciousness physically and mentally growing inside a human host may not be a new idea, it still has a lot of potential tho'. Combining this premise with an imaginative Future-Belgrade is a good idea. It's just not explored in a satisfying manner.
- the visuals are ok. Walking & running animations are a bit dodgy. Lots of neat future-tech ideas, some fine compositional angles. Unfortunately the characters lacked...'character'.
- some cool music passages, tho' mostly the tracks are very generic.
- it wasn't just that the characters' visuals lacked something, they were also written unmemorably. No one really stood out, not even the main character.
- the Serbian voice-actors sound mostly bored. They sound just like how it was recorded: some guy/gal sitting in a booth reading aloud words on a page. I usually prefer to listen to the audio the animation-production came from, but the other problem was that there was far too much dialogue, keeping me too busy reading subs (and I'm a quick reader too). The other issue was switching to an audio-language I understand - in this case German - degraded the soundtrack-quality: music was pitched-up - like a PAL DVD is, except this was a bluray - and sounded thinner, less beefy.
- the other problem with too-much-dialogue is that the story becomes tell-don't-show...exposition after exposition...it frankly got a little boring. The characters barely ever stopped talking. The only times they were quiet is whenever we got a short action scene with that generic music blaring. Problem there was the action was hectic, nothing to really follow. Very style-over-substance.
- quite a few scene-transitions are clumsy...suddenly the characters would be in a completely different place, it didn't feel like a natural transition.
- the odd bit of nudity is gratuitous.
- the ending is abrupt & unsatisfying.
Overall not much to recommend it other than the occasional visual feast of a possible Future-Belgrade.
To end on a somewhat positive note: i prefer it to the last animation I watched: Advent Children! Technotise at least showed glimpses of promise.