March 07, 2005
Movie Review: Sky Blue
Square-Enix fans have reason to rejoice. While the Japanese based videogame company gears up to release its second CGI movie, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, you can get a taste of the epic, crazy, often-confusing Japanese drama-in-cinema-form with Sky Blue.
The presentation (a mix of CG and traditional animation) was beautiful to a fault. Motorcycles weaved in and out of crowds, small aircraft swooped across perfectly rendered water. As Dutton pointed out afterwards, a lot of the scenes had a very contrived feeling, a feeling of "okay, now they're just showing off." A lot of the scenes actually felt like they could have been Akira outtakes and the music didn't help dispel this association. There was even a motorcycle chase scene set to drums. This being said, I have to express my opinion here of "so what?"
The story was... well, it was so-so. If nothing else, it held very well to the traditional Japanese video game plot, despite it not being a video game. The world has been devastated by 100 years of toxic rain. Civilization has crashed around all but the world's only organic city, Ecoban. Those who live within the walls of Ecoban have it easy. Those outside (Ecoban didn't let in any refugees), called the "Diggers," have a pretty shitty life, what with all the toxic rain and the oppression by the Ecoban elite. A few defectors, sympathetic to the Digger cause, decide to balance the scales. You've got your lonely hero, your love interest, your rag-tag bunch of misfits who don't understand the hero but come to support him, your wise old mentor to the hero who shows him the way, and your plot that makes you scratch your head and wonder what just happened when it's all over. Nothing new there.
In the end, I'd say Sky Blue has more good to offer than bad. The quietly moody opening scene alone was worth the bizarre resolution at the end. I'd recommend it, but you could probably wait for a DVD release.
Justin at March 7, 2005 11:49 AM
psst - Sky Blue is Korean
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Justin at March 7, 2005 12:01 PM
just thought that was interesting from a japanese anime plot filtered through a slightly different cultural lens thingy. Also for those familiar with the slightly different character models found with Korean anime, this film's character designs are very typically Korean, especially the eyes.
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kenji at March 7, 2005 12:17 PM
Re: psst - Sky Blue is Korean
Yup, it is. It's a detail I chose to leave out because I didn't think it mattered to my overall impression of the movie. I suppose that you could read quite a lot into that, though. Here's a story that's typically Japanese, told ("filtered," to use your words) through the eyes of Korean animators and storytellers. You even be able to stretch the story to some kind of crazy cultural analogy. Are the Diggers (the oppressed lowerclass) supposed to represent the Koreans during the Japanese occupation? Are the Ecoban-residents the comfy Japanese?
I don't know, something that's probably there, whether intentional or not is questionable.
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