Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Hironobu Sakaguchi Moto Sakakibara
Produced by	Jun Aida Chris Lee Akio Sakai
Written by	Hironobu Sakaguchi Al Reinert Jeff Vintar
Starring	Ming-Na Alec Baldwin James Woods Donald Sutherland Ving Rhames Steve Buscemi Peri Gilpin
Music by	Elliot Goldenthal
Cinematography	Moto Sakakibara
Editing by	Christopher S. Capp
Studio	Square Pictures Square Enix Studios Chris Lee Productions
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	July 2, 2001 (2001-07-02) (Premiere) July 11, 2001 (2001-07-11) (United States) August 3, 2001 (United Kingdom)
Running time	106 minutes
Country	United States Japan
Language	English
Budget	$137 million
Gross revenue	$85,131,830

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a 2001 Japanese-American computer animated science fiction film directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games. It was the first photorealistic computer animated feature film. It features the voices of Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, Ving Rhames, Peri Gilpin and Steve Buscemi. The Spirits Within follows scientists Aki Ross and Doctor Sid in their efforts to free a post-apocalyptic Earth from a mysterious and deadly alien race known as the Phantoms, which has driven the remnants of humanity into "barrier cities". They must compete against General Hein, who wishes to use more violent means to end the conflict.

Square Pictures rendered the film using some of the most advanced processing capabilities available for film animating at the time. A render farm consisting of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's almost 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 some four years to complete the film. Square intended to make the character of Aki Ross into the world's first photorealistic computer-animated actress, with plans for appearances in multiple films in different roles.

The Spirits Within debuted to mixed critical reception, but was widely praised for the realism of the computer-animated characters. Due to rising costs, the film greatly exceeded its original budget towards the end of production, reaching a final cost of US$137 million, of which it made back only $85 million at the box office. The film is blamed for the demise of Square Pictures,^[1] and has been called a box office bomb.^[2]

Plot

In the year 2065, a future Earth is infested by Phantoms: alien life forms capable of killing humans by physical contact. The remaining humans living in "barrier cities" all over the world are engaged in an ongoing struggle to free the planet. After being infected by a Phantom during one of her experiments, Aki Ross (Ming-Na) and her mentor, Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland), uncover a means of defeating the Phantoms by gathering eight spirit signatures that, when joined, can negate the Phantoms. Aki is searching for the sixth spirit in the ruins of New York City when she is cornered by Phantoms but is rescued by Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin) and his squad "Deep Eyes", consisting of Ryan Whittaker (Ving Rhames), Neil Fleming (Steve Buscemi) and Jane Proudfoot (Peri Gilpin). It is revealed that Gray was once romantically involved with Aki.

Upon returning to her barrier city, Aki joins Sid and appears before the leadership council along with General Hein (James Woods), who is determined to use the powerful Zeus space cannon to destroy the Phantoms. Aki delays the use of the Zeus cannon by revealing she has been infected, and the collected spirit signatures are keeping her infection stable. This revelation convinces Hein that she is being controlled by the Phantoms. Aki and the Deep Eyes squad succeed in finding the seventh spirit as Aki's infection begins to worsen and she slips into unconsciousness.

Aki's dream reveals the Phantoms are the spirits of dead aliens brought to Earth on a fragment of their destroyed planet. Sid uses the seventh spirit to bring Aki's infection back under control, reviving her. To scare the council into giving him clearance to fire the Zeus cannon Hein lowers part of the barrier shield protecting the city. Though Hein intended that only a few Phantoms enter, his plan backfires and Phantoms invade the entire city. Aki, Sid and the Deep Eyes attempt to reach Aki's spaceship, their means of escape but Ryan, Neil and Jane are killed by Phantoms. Sid finds the eighth spirit at the crater site of the alien asteroid's impact on Earth. Hein escapes and boards the Zeus space-station where he finally receives authorization to fire the cannon.

Sid lowers a shielded vehicle, with Aki and Gray, into the crater to locate the final spirit. Just before they can reach it, Hein fires the Zeus cannon into the crater not only destroying the eighth spirit but revealing the Phantom Gaia. Aki has a vision of the Phantom home planet, where she is able to receive the eighth spirit from the alien particles in herself. When Aki wakes, she and Gray combine it with the other seven. Hein continues to fire the Zeus cannon despite overheating warnings and unintentionally destroys the cannon and himself. Gray sacrifices himself as a medium needed to physically transmit the completed spirit into the alien Gaia. The Gaia is returned to normal as the Phantoms ascend into space, finally at peace. Aki is pulled from the crater holding Gray's body and looking into the newly liberated world.

Production

Aki Ross's voice actor, Ming-Na Wen, was selected by Sakaguchi based on his decision that she fit Aki's personality.^[3] Ming-Na, who found the role via her publicist,^[4] said she felt like she had given birth with her voice to the character.^[5] She noted the role was not without its difficulties; especially working without the presence and spontaneity of real actors.

She gradually accustomed herself to this feeling, commenting that the voice-acting work did not take much time, as she would just go into the studio "once or twice a month for about four months" with no need for make-up and costuming sessions.^[6] The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER.^[6] Whilst Square ruled out any chance of a sequel to The Spirits Within before it was even completed, they were considering using Aki's character in other films. Ming-Na has said she would be willing if asked, to continue voicing Aki.^[6]

Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations for the films production.^[7] The basic film was rendered at a home-made render farm created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations. Animation was filmed using motion capture technology.^[8] 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters.^[9] The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render.^[9] By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film.^[9] It is estimated that over the films four year production, approximately 200 people working on it put in a combined 120 years of work.^[9]

From early on, it had been decided that The Spirits Within would be filmed entirely in English.^[10] In order to keep the film in line with Hironobu Sakaguchi's vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production.^[10] Sakaguchi stated he was pleased with the films final cut, saying he would not have changed anything if given the chance.^[10] The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs, whilst maintaining staff salaries.^[10] The film's final cost of $137 million^[11] blew out from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million.^[8]

Surprisingly for a film loosely based on a video game series, there were never any plans for a game adaptation of the film itself. Sakaguchi indicated the reason for this was lack of powerful gaming hardware at the time, feeling the graphics in any game adaptation would be far too much of a step down from the graphics in the film itself.^[10]

Character design

Ming-Na's character was designed to be as realistic as possible; Square Pictures intended for the CGI character to be the world's first artificial actress to appear in multiple films in multiple roles.

The model for Aki was designed to be as realistically human as possible, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview "I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human."^[3] Each of her 60,000 hairs was separately and fully animated and rendered,^[5] her entire model was estimated to be made up of around 400,000 polygons.^[12] Sakaguchi intended to have Aki as Square Picture's "main star", with intentions to use her in later games and films by Square and the flexibility of being able to modify aspects of her such as her age for such appearances.^[3]

Aki's appearance was conceived by lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Sakaguchi to consider and then used the selected design as a guide for her character model.^[13] During her development, he altered the model to appear more intelligent looking, shortening the hair and removing makeup from what he perceived as a "supermodel" looking character in favor of an appearance that would "convince people that she's a scientist."^[14] In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make her appear as realistic as possible, making her similar to himself in as many ways that he could in terms of animation, including elements of his personality through facial expressions.^[13] Sato concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "she's a lot cuter".^[13]

While the near lifelike appearance of the characters in the film was acknowledged as a technological tour-de-force, some commentators felt the character renderings fell into the trap robotic scientists called the "uncanny valley". This is a point where a robot or animated character becomes very realistic, but subtly different enough from reality to feel "creepy." There was some discussion that the poor box office of the film was due to the audience becoming uncomfortable with the almost, but not quite human appearance of the CGI "actors."^[15]

Reception

Before the film's release there was already skepticism of its potential to be financially successful; Time magazine noted that video game adaptations had a poor track record when it came to the box office, also noting that it was Sakaguchi's first feature film.^[8] The film was released in the United States on July 11, 2001; making $32 million in North America and going on to gross $85 million in worldwide box office receipts.^[11] The film achieved average to poor results at the box office in most of Southeast Asia, however it performed well in Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.^[16]

The Spirits Within holds a 43% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 141 reviews (61 positive, 80 negative), where the consensus is the film "raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed".^[17] Similarly it has a weighted score of 49/100 at Metacritic based on 28 professional reviews.^[18] The film was nominated for "Best Sound Editing – Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign" at the Golden Reel Awards^[19] as well as "Best Animated Feature" by the Online Film Critics Society^[20] but did not win either award.

Roger Ebert was a strong advocate of the film, he gave the film 3½ stars out of 4, praising it as a "technical milestone" while conceding that its "nuts and bolts" story lacked "the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's A.I.". He noted that while he did not once feel convinced Aki Ross was an actual human being she was "lifelike", stating her creators "dare us to admire their craft. If Aki is not as real as a human actress, she's about as human as a Playmate who has been retouched to glossy perfection."^[21] He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing more films made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted.^[22]

Entertainment Weekly named Aki an "It Girl", stating that "Calling this action heroine a cartoon would be like calling a Rembrandt a doodle."^[23] She was voted to be one of the sexiest women ever by Maxim and its readers, ranking 87th out of 100 and became the first fictional woman to ever make the list, additionally appearing on the issue's cover.^[24] Her appearance has been received positively by critics,^[25] with praise for the finer details of the character model such as the rendering of her hair.^[26] The New York Times described her as having the "sinewy efficiency" of Aliens franchise character Ellen Ripley and visual appeal of Julia Roberts' portrayal of Erin Brockovich.^[24] The book Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality described her as a virtual actress having a "beauty that is 'really' impressive", comparing her to video game character Lara Croft.^[27] In contrast, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams criticized her character as an example of the constantly kidnapped female in Japanese cinema, further "diluted" by her existence solely as a computer-generated character representing "an ideal, cinematic female character that has no real referent".^[28] Action and Adventure Cinema described her as among the "least overtly eroticised" female characters in science fiction, though noted her as an example of the treatment of such characters as pin-up girls and "transformed [...] into an erotic fantasy machine."^[29] Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality noted the emphasis by her creators on making her appear real, though questioned the portrayal of her character, in particular if the presence of her unconsciousness in the film was intended as a means to have the character appear more human to viewers.^[30]

The merger between Square and Enix, which had been under consideration since at least 2000 according to the then Enix chairman Yasuhiro Fukushima, was delayed because of the failure of the film and Enix' hesitation at merging with a company that had just lost a substantial amount of money.^[31]

Related media

The soundtrack to the film was released on July 3, 2001 by Sony Music.^[32] It was composed by Elliot Goldenthal, with the performing orchestra conducted by Belgian composer Dirk Brossé. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi opted for the acclaimed film composer instead of Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of the Final Fantasy games' soundtracks, a decision met with mixed opinion as Goldenthal was completely unknown to many of the game's fans.^[33] Nevertheless Goldenthal's work was met with very positive reviews,^[32][33][34] and the album was nominated for a World Soundtrack Award.^[35]

A novelization was written by Dean Wesley Smith and published by Pocket Books in June 2001.^[36] The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a companion book, was published by BradyGames in August 2001.^[37] Edited by Steven L. Kent, the 240 page color book contains a forward by director Sakaguchi and extensive information on all aspects of the films creation, including concept art, storyboards, sets and props, layout, motion capture and animation.^[38]

References

External links

• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at the Internet Movie Database
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at Allmovie
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at Rotten Tomatoes
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at Box Office Mojo
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within at Metacritic
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (film) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia