Aki Ross
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Dr. Aki Ross is a fictional character in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, voiced by Chinese actress Ming-Na Wen. She was one of the first ever photorealistic computer-generated human characters ever created and used in a film.
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[edit] Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Dr. Ross is a scientist in the fictional post-apocalyptic mid-21st century who has been infected by a race of aliens called Phantoms, that landed on Earth and are destroying all life on Earth. Even though she is dying because of her experience with the aliens, she now has the ability to link herself to their secret of survival, through strange recurring dreams, and how she can use it to help the remnants of humanity fight the xenomorphic parasites who seem to be sucking the souls out of the surviving population.
She has now allied herself with the "Deep Eyes Squad," a specialist troop of soldiers who are determined to eradicate the alien menace once and for all. Aki is charged with finding the eight special spirits which are supposed to help save the planet. She is also falling in love with the Deep Eyes Squad's captain, Gray Edwards. But she must stay true to her convictions and work out the strange ominous dreams that haunt her in her quest that will hopefully liberate Earth and save her own doomed existence.
Ultimately, Gray sacrifices himself when the spirit infecting Aki turns out to be the eighth spirit required to neutralise the alien ghosts.
[edit] Production
Aki Ross was created by Square Pictures under Square Co., Ltd. solely for the purpose of use in their debut film The Spirits Within. Square, which had already been known for its incredible and revolutionary grasp of the world of computer 3D rendering, especially in the sphere of creating lifelike humans and environments (such as in their bestselling Final Fantasy series of games), set about to create their most detailed and realistic human yet.
The model used for Aki is of such high detail that every single one of her 60,000 hairs was separately and fully animated and rendered, at a render farm consisting of 960 Pentium III-933MHz workstations that took 1.5 hours to render each frame.
[edit] Reappearances
It was originally intended that Aki might reappear in many places across Square's range of merchandise, but Aki Ross has so far not reappeared in any film or computer game, although she makes an appearance (along with the rest of the film's virtual cast) in a hidden easter egg parody of Michael Jackson's Thriller music video created for the DVD release of the film. Also on the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within DVD, a bikini model photo shoot of Aki Ross is also included as one of the special features.
She was also used, with a new haircut, in a demonstration video that Square Pictures made to present to the Wachowski Brothers before making Final Flight of the Osiris for The Animatrix. This video is available on the Animatrix DVD in the bonus data section and shows her acrobatically duelling with a Sentinel.
Notably, Aki was voted to be one of the sexiest women ever by Maxim and its readers, becoming the first ever fictional woman to ever make the list. There was also an internally available, anatomically correct nude model of Aki Ross that Square Pictures used to more accurately calculate the behavior of clothes on Aki's body, that has since been leaked.[citation needed]
