I just watched the U.S. theatrical release of this at my local theater. The animation is very good, seeming to me to combine 2D techniques, computer-generated effects (smoke, water waves, flowing blood, energy beams, flames, lava, etc.) and of course lots of bright colors (but not so colorful and flashy it induces headaches:-). Visually, this doesn't take a back seat to anyone.
It's obviously been carefully prepped for a U.S. release. Except for the credits being entirely Japanese characters, no clue is given to a naive viewer that this might be a variant. The voice actors (as far as I could tell all with names that can be spelled with Japanese characters) all speak completely un-accented idiomatic English. The problem of signs (shops, roadside, etc.) being in a different language is largely finessed by arranging that there just plain aren't hardly any. There aren't any written clues either - everything is drawings and diagrams. The few signs that do exist, the newspaper page we see, and even the inside of a book we get a quick glance at, have all been redrawn so they appear to have always been in English.
The thing I noticed most was the characters' mouth movements have all been redrawn to match the English dub!(?)
There's more music in the sound track than most animations (of course it's still not wall-to-wall music).
A pitch-perfect dub, a redraw of all the bits of writing, new mouth movements, and significant music add up to quite an effort to pitch this to general audiences in the U.S. as a breakout movie.
That said, the ethos just didn't mesh with my world.
The storyline (which I assume is outstanding in the anime world) doesn't to me feel right for a movie. It's standalone (no background is required to understand it), and it's obvious a lot of effort has been spent trying to make it accessible to naive audiences. Yet its manga roots still show strongly. There's far too much dialog compared to what I'm used to, the plot is far too complex for the length of a movie, and there's too much abrupt jumping back and forth and back and forth between moralizing and joking. Many movies don't use the hidden identity trope at all; some use it once; but this is the first time I've seen the "hidden identity" trope _stacked_, so a character that's revealed to be somebody else is eventually revealed _again_.
Likewise some of the attitudes just don't fit what I'm used to. I could eventually get into the inadvertently wisecracking, half-serious yet half-joking (or is it just plain juvenile?) attitude of the principal characters, but initially I found it jarring. I didn't realize until halfway through the movie that it was sometimes quite funny. The portrayal of the military as so central to the control of society, and the portrayal of military people with drab exteriors but bright interiors and plenty of independence and rather cynical attitudes, was foreign to me.
Even though the visuals and the audio had gone out of their way to enter my world as far as possible, I was left overall with the sense of peering into a different culture. It wasn't necessarily one I dislike, just one that was different enough I couldn't really get into it right away. Maybe it's just my old age showing, or maybe some sort of cultural baptism into the anime world is needed, or ...
It's obviously been carefully prepped for a U.S. release. Except for the credits being entirely Japanese characters, no clue is given to a naive viewer that this might be a variant. The voice actors (as far as I could tell all with names that can be spelled with Japanese characters) all speak completely un-accented idiomatic English. The problem of signs (shops, roadside, etc.) being in a different language is largely finessed by arranging that there just plain aren't hardly any. There aren't any written clues either - everything is drawings and diagrams. The few signs that do exist, the newspaper page we see, and even the inside of a book we get a quick glance at, have all been redrawn so they appear to have always been in English.
The thing I noticed most was the characters' mouth movements have all been redrawn to match the English dub!(?)
There's more music in the sound track than most animations (of course it's still not wall-to-wall music).
A pitch-perfect dub, a redraw of all the bits of writing, new mouth movements, and significant music add up to quite an effort to pitch this to general audiences in the U.S. as a breakout movie.
That said, the ethos just didn't mesh with my world.
The storyline (which I assume is outstanding in the anime world) doesn't to me feel right for a movie. It's standalone (no background is required to understand it), and it's obvious a lot of effort has been spent trying to make it accessible to naive audiences. Yet its manga roots still show strongly. There's far too much dialog compared to what I'm used to, the plot is far too complex for the length of a movie, and there's too much abrupt jumping back and forth and back and forth between moralizing and joking. Many movies don't use the hidden identity trope at all; some use it once; but this is the first time I've seen the "hidden identity" trope _stacked_, so a character that's revealed to be somebody else is eventually revealed _again_.
Likewise some of the attitudes just don't fit what I'm used to. I could eventually get into the inadvertently wisecracking, half-serious yet half-joking (or is it just plain juvenile?) attitude of the principal characters, but initially I found it jarring. I didn't realize until halfway through the movie that it was sometimes quite funny. The portrayal of the military as so central to the control of society, and the portrayal of military people with drab exteriors but bright interiors and plenty of independence and rather cynical attitudes, was foreign to me.
Even though the visuals and the audio had gone out of their way to enter my world as far as possible, I was left overall with the sense of peering into a different culture. It wasn't necessarily one I dislike, just one that was different enough I couldn't really get into it right away. Maybe it's just my old age showing, or maybe some sort of cultural baptism into the anime world is needed, or ...