Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

For the movie sequel to the video game Final Fantasy VII, see Advent Children.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a science fiction movie by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series of RPGs. It was released on July 11, 2001 in the United States and it was the first animated feature to seriously attempt photorealistic CGI humans. Despite aggressive promotion by Sony, it also became the second-biggest box office bomb in film history (behind Treasure Planet), with losses of over $124 million, effectively bankrupting Square Pictures.

Plot

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is set on an alien-infested Earth in the year 2065. The remaining humans live in "barrier cities" all over the world and attempt to free their planet from the Phantoms, an alien race. The only hope for the planet comes from the scientist Aki Ross and her mentor, Dr. Sid, who have a plan to destroy the Phantoms without damaging the planet, but a general named Hein is determined to use the Zeus space cannon to destroy the Phantoms—even if it means destroying the Earth in the process. While the film does carry the name Final Fantasy, it is only vaguely thematically related to Square Co., Ltd.'s popular Final Fantasy series of games. The plot, characters, and storyline were all created specifically for the movie although the character of Dr. Sid does continue the games' tradition of having a character named Cid appear in most Final Fantasy games, despite the Doctor's name spelled with an untraditional "S".

Reception

The film received mixed reviews but was not a popular success. Because the plot is typical of Japanese science-fiction anime in melding science fiction and spirituality, the movie seemed to be best received by otaku, or at least regular viewers of anime. In some aspects, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was more or less a big-budget anime movie. It became more unpopular when fans of the Final Fantasy series watched the movie to discover that it has absolutly nothing to do with the game series.

While many of the critics of the film cited problems with the story or complained of one-dimensional characters, others focused on the failings of the animation itself. While the rendering is intended to be photorealistic, the characters' motions and expressions are actually quite stiff and unexpressive compared to real human motion. This is most notable in the "doll-eyed stare" of the characters, which many viewers found particularly unnerving, but also in the rigid poses and gaits of the characters, and the lack of deformation in skin and tissue accompanying character motion such as speech and grasping. The modeling of lighting on skin and hair (which in reality are subtly translucent) is also limited, giving the characters a "painted statue" look. As a result, the film is often cited as an example of animation that falls into the uncanny valley perhaps most famously by critic Roger Ebert[http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040111/ANSWERMAN/40810009.

Chris Lee, the producer of Final Fantasy, defended his use of animation, stating that live actors often cannot physically accomplish what computer characters easily can, citing his experience from making Starship Troopers and Godzilla. An early scene in the movie, in which Aki floats weightless in an orbital spacecraft, illustrates his point: such scenes are trivial to shoot when your actress has no weight to begin with. Lee also noted that the difference between the CGI and live action footage can be jarring for viewers when the film requires heavy use of computer effects in almost every scene.

The box office results were quite low at $32 million for North America. The shortfall from the astronomical cost of production of $137 million (plus a further $30 million for marketing) essentially bankrupted Square Pictures, the subsidiary of Square that produced it. However, Square Pictures did survive long enough to produce an animated tie-in to The Matrix, Final Flight of the Osiris (see also The Animatrix). Final Flight of the Osiris increased the level of realism shown, addressing some of the "painted statue" criticisms.

The film made only $55 million more in overseas box office, meaning total losses were approximately $123 million (the studio typically receives half the box office gross). The domestic box office loss was at the time apparently the largest in film history.

There is speculation that the financial failure of the film, coupled with other circumstances at the time and following years, proved to be the catalyst that inspired Square Co., Ltd.'s merger with Enix.

Technology

Final Fantasy quickly, though briefly, became a benchmark of CGI graphics realism to which performance of computer graphics hardware and quality of images in computer games is compared.

Creation

Square Pictures entered into a contract with Alias|Wavefront, a division of Silicon Graphics to use the new Maya 3D animation studio software which allow their animators and programmers to write code to create whatever special functionality they desire. Square initially purchased 40 Silicon Graphics Octane workstations, and then purchased four of the newly introduced SGI Origin 200 servers.

Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations.SGI Fact Sheet

Rendering

The basic movie was rendered at a home-made render farm which consisted of 960 Pentium III-933MHz workstations. The render farm was made by Square Pictures located in Hawaii. Later in 2001 nVidia released a technology demo for the NVIDIA Quadro DCC, rendering several scenes from the movie in real-time (compared with 1.5 hours per frame for the movie), albeit at only 10 frames per second and with much lower quality (simpler model with noticeable polygons, clipping problems, less realistic skin and textile with no/poor shaders – "plastic" look, unrealistic lighting, poor specular highlighting and very limited self-shadowing).

The Square Pictures render farm and the nVidia demo used completely different and unrelated rendering algorithms -- ray tracing and other pixel-by-pixel CPU-based techniques never intended interactive speeds by the former, and a GPU-based rasterized polygon mesh by the latter. The render farm also rendered at resolutions far higher than the GeForce 3 is capable of. This makes frame-rate comparisons between the two uninformative. Rather, the demo showed the high quality that raster graphics had achieved.

Prior to the film's release (and subsequent box office failure), Square had indicated plans for the Aki Ross "synthetic actress" to appear in other films, possibly even interacting with live actors. A sample of what this might have looked like can be seen on the introduction to the second DVD in the Special Edition release, which shows Aki "breaking character" after filming a scene and walking through the studio, interacting with both CGI and real people.

Shortly after the release of the film, the character of Aki Ross became the first computer-generated entry in Maxim's Hot 100.

Trivia

Although named after the character Cid, Dr. Sid has more in common with the character Bugenhagen from Final Fantasy VII who had a similar Gaia theory. However, considering there is a different Cid in every Final Fantasy game, it is doubtful that Square intended to have the character relate to any Final Fantasy character.

Gray's unit has 4 members just like most games in the Final Fantasy series (I, II, III, V, VI, IX). Final Fantasy IV allowed up to five party members.

All of the main characters in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within have first names consisting of four or less characters. This is most likely a throwback to the first Final Fantasy game, in which the names a player gave the main characters were limited to four letters, due to the technological limitations that existed when the game was first made.

Voice actors

Aki Ross: Ming-Na
Dr. Sid: Donald Sutherland
Gray Edwards: Alec Baldwin
Ryan Whittaker: Ving Rhames
Jane Proudfoot: Peri Gilpin
Neil Fleming: Steve Buscemi
General Hein: James Woods

Screenshots

Image:Aki8.jpg|Aki Ross in the opening of The Spirits Within. Image:Beasts.jpg|The Phantoms Image:Aki3.jpg|Aki must discover the meaning behind the vivid dreams she keeps having about the Phantoms.

Reference

External links

Behind Scenes Interview by Ars Technica
Michael Jackson's Thriller as interpreted by the cast of the movie

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