>he doesn't know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within#Character_design >While Square ruled out any chance of a sequel to The Spirits Within before it was even completed, Sakaguchi intended to position Aki as being the "main star" for Square Pictures, using her in later games and films by Square, and including the flexibility of being able to modify aspects such as her age for such appearances.
Aki Ross was literally designed to be a digital actress who would take roles in movies and games. Not just "this design is popular, let's use it again," but actually building her from the ground up with the intention of her not just being a character in one movie, but being used as an actress in her own right. That's why she appeared in Maxim and other places usually intended for human models and actresses.
I guess I could see it working as long as it's purely animated films, like Tezuka's Star System. For CGI it could mean time saving since you can reuse models
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Tezuka%27s_Star_System
Spirits Within is one of those times before. The earliest one that I know of, as Spirits Within was also the first ever full-length photorealistic CG animated film. You have to remember Spirits Within released 21 years ago and was in development a few years before that.
What's the difference between doling out characters for advertisements? Like Snoopy with Met-life Hell, Disney has don't animated actors technically with Talespin/Jungle Book which reused the same characters in a completely premise.
"Digital Actress" has been tried before and it's literally always super cringe.
Soon companies are gonna try this again and in 20 years digital actors/actresses will likely be a thing
In hindsight Square was surprisingly way too ahead of their time with this concept.
I remember they did it again with Lightning a bit in FFXIII too.
Nowadays it could work though, we already are seeing it in movies like Avatar where the characters are fully CG and there's the whole V-Tuber trend that's arisen.
I wouldn't be surprised if eventually studios start to go with artificial digital actors, it would spare them from having to deal with PR disasters like whatever the hell is going on with Ezra Miller right now, but it also sounds like the kind of dysfunctional idea you'd see in a cyberpunk story
Was it really THAT bad?
No, I watched it a few years ago it's a pretty 7/10 action flick.
I think the main reason people trashed it was because the setting was way too sci-fi for what Final Fantasy fans wanted back then.
[...]
Correction, Lightning was just the Louis Vuitton campaign, There was also a prada campaign that featured her party.
I really liked these ad campaigns. They should do more stuff like this. I want to see a Silent Hill type horror game get a deal with Nike or something, and so you have ads with freaky monsters in sports gear and overpriced sneakers.
>In hindsight Square was surprisingly way too ahead of their time with this concept.
I don't know, I feel the exact opposite. The idea of a CG actor is a very quaint product of its time. The comparisons to vtubers are obvious and funny, but it's different because those are just internet avatars for real people.
This is something that only really has any appeal in the early 2000s when CG was still young and hip and people were fascinated by realistic hair physics. As technology improved, she'd just become Square's Mickey Mouse, just a mascot character and nothing else assuming she ever really caught on even if Spirits Within was a hit.
15.ai and other such projects don't happen in a bubble. Voice emulation, body scanning, "actors" will be used for motion capture while the voice and image is overlaid.
They weren't ahead of their times at all. They were just mentally fricking moronic about it. When you crossover with 1 common character across multiple IPs said character has to be fricking memorable to begin with and share something common like voice, body, personality. Aki Ross was the most generic boring as frick character possible just like any token asian character. Her voice was boring, her design was boring, she had no personality to speak of, she was a complete blank slate.
"Hey it's the guy who played in Frodo but now he's voicing some animated character
"Hey it's the English voice actor for Songoku but now he's playing Son Wukong in Monkey Kid"
"Hey it's fricking Harry Potter but he's playing in some drug drama movie"
"Hey it's Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey played in fricking Sonic the Hedgehog"
"Hey it's Deadpool playing as Pikachu"
nah it was a pretty whatever movie. not that bad but also not good. at least as far as i remember
square greatly overestimated the strength of the final fantasy brand and thought people would flock to this pretty boring movie based on the name alone. not to mention the high budget, the fact that most people at the time thought animation = for kids, and that serious dramas have never been a popular subgenre in animation
They also made it a straight-up sci-fi movie in a time when the Final Fantasy games were only dipping their toes into adding steampunk- and dieselpunk-type elements. I remember all my friends wondering where the chocobos and moogles were, for instance, expecting the standard FF cameo elements but receiving none. I think there was a guy named Cid and that was the extent of referential connections to the FF brand.
>I think there was a guy named Cid
They actually didn't even get that right, his name was spelled Sid with an S. It came off like using the name of the franchise and then deliberately shunning the actual defining traits of the franchise.
I haven’t watched it in decades, but I remember being more bored than anything else. The character were pretty one dimensional, and the plot was basically a video game plot (“We gotta collect the <number of magic items> to defeat the evil monsters!”.
what? no, it was something about an alien meteorite carrying alien ghosts while humans were draining the planet from its life force or whatever, I think south park did a parody at some point.
The scientists in the film are looking to collect 8 spirits because they can combine them to create an energy wave that will destroy the aliens. The military dude wants to blow up the meteor that the aliens came from using a satellite laser weapon, but the scientists think that’ll harm the Earth’s Spirit, Gaia, which the post apocalyptic city leaders thinks is kinda crazy. So they have to rush to find the spirits before the military dude can enact his plan (I think they already had some at the start of the movie). The meteor contained the spirit of the alien planet, and all the aliens were ghosts.
Probably should have done a more traditional FF story for their 1st movie outing. Besides Gaia it's hardly recognizable with the rest of the series. It's like if SEGA started there films with Ristar or NIGHTS
No but it didn't really need to be animated. Felt like a basic action movie that could have just been live-action with some CGI monsters thrown in. They wasted their potential.
The CGI was the reason for doing it animated. Squaresoft was bolstered by high praise for FF7, 8, 9 cutscenes and choreography. They felt they could it. The movie looked fine. Some movements looked a little stiff though.
>Let's make a final fantasy movie >but the only recognizable trope from the games is that there's a character named Cid but they couldn't even get that right and spelled it with an S.
They also made it a straight-up sci-fi movie in a time when the Final Fantasy games were only dipping their toes into adding steampunk- and dieselpunk-type elements. I remember all my friends wondering where the chocobos and moogles were, for instance, expecting the standard FF cameo elements but receiving none. I think there was a guy named Cid and that was the extent of referential connections to the FF brand.
Frick off with that "diesel punk" shit. It's fake as frick genre that doesn't exist. Steam punk barely fricking exists. And you're moronic. FF7 was cyberpunk dystopian bladerunner shit, FF8 was modern and standard sci fi shit. The movie wasn't entirely out of place for going heavy on the sci fi aesthetic that 7 and 8 popularized before the movie came out. They just went full moron and removed any of the fantasy aesthetics those two games still had.
honestly the script and worldbuilding holds up way better than 90% of Hollywood sci-fi movies. sure it might seem a bit bland if you compare it with FF games and their 1000-page scripts for 120 hours of gameplay, but it was still fleshed out surprisingly well.
also the way the ghosts can instantly kill humans through the walls would probably have terrified me as a kid.
What board does spirits within belong to? I made a thread for it on Cinemaphile earlier today and the mods deleted it. Yet I don't think it's for Cinemaphile either. Cinemaphile I guess?
It's an animated film so I don't see why it wouldn't belong on Cinemaphile just like Lightyear and other CG animated films. It could also go on Cinemaphile, but it's not out of place on Cinemaphile.
I only watched like one scene but the idea of some space monster ripping out your soul really fricked with me.
Also I was kind of pissy it wasn't like final fantasy the video games that I didn't actually play past some demos at Target and seeing clips on G4.
In retrospect it's a good thing I didn't get into Final Fantasy, that shit looks terrible.
I'd say Gorillaz is a fun gimmick but it's not as if they went totally up their ass with the idea, Damon and Jamie know when to just put their foot down and say "okay let me tell you about the project for realsies."
Netflix has a movie that takes pretty blatant inspiration from The Spirits Within, but has a Russian super-sci-fi explanation for the ghosts rather than alien ghosts.
I like it, but it repeats itself with macho military guys losing their shit over being unable to even so much as touch the ghosts, and having Gordon Freeman science up some bullshit to help them survive until he suddenly has everything he needs to deduce the nature of their enemy via some Adam west style bullshittery and finally makes some plasma guns that allow them to fight back. I'm just glad CIA lady wasn't an in your face girlpower type character. I wouldn't mind an actual Half life movie from the same team,
I blame this movie for the sudden change of style in final fantasy going from knights and magic in medieval settings to some fricking futuristic bullshit swarming with magic robots
8 still keep a very final fantasy like feeling but already going into the point of no return, 7 wasn't even meant to be a final fantasy but square was in some deep shit back then and had to rebrand the project, when FF 12 finally arrived it became the standar for the future final fantasy games
what? 12 is pretty high fantasy, it's set in Ivalice from the FF Tactics series. The most advance technology there was muskets and Airships. 13 was a futuristic fantasy, and 15 was the real world with fantastical elements.
Square Enix thought they had fricking Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario on their hands or some shit.
The idea was decent, but for fricks sake much more popular IPs like Scooby Doo already fricking did it. What the hell was Square Enix thinking with some noname OC?
Remember when she was in Playboy?
It was Maxim, actually
>CG actor
Did Square predict vtubers?
Yes
A popular model or design gets used for multiple projects. I could see something like 2B or Tifa Lockhart
>he doesn't know
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within#Character_design
>While Square ruled out any chance of a sequel to The Spirits Within before it was even completed, Sakaguchi intended to position Aki as being the "main star" for Square Pictures, using her in later games and films by Square, and including the flexibility of being able to modify aspects such as her age for such appearances.
Aki Ross was literally designed to be a digital actress who would take roles in movies and games. Not just "this design is popular, let's use it again," but actually building her from the ground up with the intention of her not just being a character in one movie, but being used as an actress in her own right. That's why she appeared in Maxim and other places usually intended for human models and actresses.
"Digital Actress" has been tried before and it's literally always super cringe.
I guess I could see it working as long as it's purely animated films, like Tezuka's Star System. For CGI it could mean time saving since you can reuse models
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Tezuka%27s_Star_System
Spirits Within is one of those times before. The earliest one that I know of, as Spirits Within was also the first ever full-length photorealistic CG animated film. You have to remember Spirits Within released 21 years ago and was in development a few years before that.
What's the difference between doling out characters for advertisements? Like Snoopy with Met-life Hell, Disney has don't animated actors technically with Talespin/Jungle Book which reused the same characters in a completely premise.
In hindsight Square was surprisingly way too ahead of their time with this concept.
I remember they did it again with Lightning a bit in FFXIII too.
Nowadays it could work though, we already are seeing it in movies like Avatar where the characters are fully CG and there's the whole V-Tuber trend that's arisen.
I wouldn't be surprised if eventually studios start to go with artificial digital actors, it would spare them from having to deal with PR disasters like whatever the hell is going on with Ezra Miller right now, but it also sounds like the kind of dysfunctional idea you'd see in a cyberpunk story
No, I watched it a few years ago it's a pretty 7/10 action flick.
I think the main reason people trashed it was because the setting was way too sci-fi for what Final Fantasy fans wanted back then.
>I remember they did it again with Lightning a bit in FFXIII too
How so?
They used her and some of the other party members as models for a Louie Vuitton campaign
Correction, Lightning was just the Louis Vuitton campaign, There was also a prada campaign that featured her party.
I really liked these ad campaigns. They should do more stuff like this. I want to see a Silent Hill type horror game get a deal with Nike or something, and so you have ads with freaky monsters in sports gear and overpriced sneakers.
>In hindsight Square was surprisingly way too ahead of their time with this concept.
I don't know, I feel the exact opposite. The idea of a CG actor is a very quaint product of its time. The comparisons to vtubers are obvious and funny, but it's different because those are just internet avatars for real people.
This is something that only really has any appeal in the early 2000s when CG was still young and hip and people were fascinated by realistic hair physics. As technology improved, she'd just become Square's Mickey Mouse, just a mascot character and nothing else assuming she ever really caught on even if Spirits Within was a hit.
15.ai and other such projects don't happen in a bubble. Voice emulation, body scanning, "actors" will be used for motion capture while the voice and image is overlaid.
They weren't ahead of their times at all. They were just mentally fricking moronic about it. When you crossover with 1 common character across multiple IPs said character has to be fricking memorable to begin with and share something common like voice, body, personality. Aki Ross was the most generic boring as frick character possible just like any token asian character. Her voice was boring, her design was boring, she had no personality to speak of, she was a complete blank slate.
"Hey it's the guy who played in Frodo but now he's voicing some animated character
"Hey it's the English voice actor for Songoku but now he's playing Son Wukong in Monkey Kid"
"Hey it's fricking Harry Potter but he's playing in some drug drama movie"
"Hey it's Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey played in fricking Sonic the Hedgehog"
"Hey it's Deadpool playing as Pikachu"
Which roles would she have been good in, Cinemaphile?
The lead of an erotic thriller.
Imagine if she played the Conductor from the Polar Express. That would certainly be a wild experience.
Was it really THAT bad?
nah it was a pretty whatever movie. not that bad but also not good. at least as far as i remember
square greatly overestimated the strength of the final fantasy brand and thought people would flock to this pretty boring movie based on the name alone. not to mention the high budget, the fact that most people at the time thought animation = for kids, and that serious dramas have never been a popular subgenre in animation
They also made it a straight-up sci-fi movie in a time when the Final Fantasy games were only dipping their toes into adding steampunk- and dieselpunk-type elements. I remember all my friends wondering where the chocobos and moogles were, for instance, expecting the standard FF cameo elements but receiving none. I think there was a guy named Cid and that was the extent of referential connections to the FF brand.
>I think there was a guy named Cid
They actually didn't even get that right, his name was spelled Sid with an S. It came off like using the name of the franchise and then deliberately shunning the actual defining traits of the franchise.
I haven’t watched it in decades, but I remember being more bored than anything else. The character were pretty one dimensional, and the plot was basically a video game plot (“We gotta collect the <number of magic items> to defeat the evil monsters!”.
what? no, it was something about an alien meteorite carrying alien ghosts while humans were draining the planet from its life force or whatever, I think south park did a parody at some point.
There was something about them needing to find seven specific animals so they can use their DNA to make an antidote or some crap.
The scientists in the film are looking to collect 8 spirits because they can combine them to create an energy wave that will destroy the aliens. The military dude wants to blow up the meteor that the aliens came from using a satellite laser weapon, but the scientists think that’ll harm the Earth’s Spirit, Gaia, which the post apocalyptic city leaders thinks is kinda crazy. So they have to rush to find the spirits before the military dude can enact his plan (I think they already had some at the start of the movie). The meteor contained the spirit of the alien planet, and all the aliens were ghosts.
Probably should have done a more traditional FF story for their 1st movie outing. Besides Gaia it's hardly recognizable with the rest of the series. It's like if SEGA started there films with Ristar or NIGHTS
No but it didn't really need to be animated. Felt like a basic action movie that could have just been live-action with some CGI monsters thrown in. They wasted their potential.
The CGI was the reason for doing it animated. Squaresoft was bolstered by high praise for FF7, 8, 9 cutscenes and choreography. They felt they could it. The movie looked fine. Some movements looked a little stiff though.
The CG blew my young and impresionable mind
Literally one of the most forgettable movies
>Let's make a final fantasy movie
>but the only recognizable trope from the games is that there's a character named Cid but they couldn't even get that right and spelled it with an S.
Frick off with that "diesel punk" shit. It's fake as frick genre that doesn't exist. Steam punk barely fricking exists. And you're moronic. FF7 was cyberpunk dystopian bladerunner shit, FF8 was modern and standard sci fi shit. The movie wasn't entirely out of place for going heavy on the sci fi aesthetic that 7 and 8 popularized before the movie came out. They just went full moron and removed any of the fantasy aesthetics those two games still had.
>FF8 was modern and standard sci fi shit.
Yet it still had swords and magic and also everyone hated it so much they had to course correct with FF9.
It was ok. There was too many critics crying about "uncanny valley" when it really isnt
honestly the script and worldbuilding holds up way better than 90% of Hollywood sci-fi movies. sure it might seem a bit bland if you compare it with FF games and their 1000-page scripts for 120 hours of gameplay, but it was still fleshed out surprisingly well.
also the way the ghosts can instantly kill humans through the walls would probably have terrified me as a kid.
What board does spirits within belong to? I made a thread for it on Cinemaphile earlier today and the mods deleted it. Yet I don't think it's for Cinemaphile either. Cinemaphile I guess?
Cinemaphile actually, it's the same thing as avatar
It's an animated film so I don't see why it wouldn't belong on Cinemaphile just like Lightyear and other CG animated films. It could also go on Cinemaphile, but it's not out of place on Cinemaphile.
Cinemaphile Cinemaphile thing since it's a USA-Japan coproduction like Ulysses 31 I guess
Ulysses 31 was french/japan
Oh shit yeah my bad
I remember reading about real actresses being worried that she'd take work from them.
So much for that.
Soon companies are gonna try this again and in 20 years digital actors/actresses will likely be a thing
Isn't that Vtubers?
Vtubers are the start.
>virtual actors
I'd say that the idea was really stupid, but I was also a big Gorillaz fanboy, so what do I know?
I only watched like one scene but the idea of some space monster ripping out your soul really fricked with me.
Also I was kind of pissy it wasn't like final fantasy the video games that I didn't actually play past some demos at Target and seeing clips on G4.
In retrospect it's a good thing I didn't get into Final Fantasy, that shit looks terrible.
I'd say Gorillaz is a fun gimmick but it's not as if they went totally up their ass with the idea, Damon and Jamie know when to just put their foot down and say "okay let me tell you about the project for realsies."
I feel that last part when he yells his name, should be on a shirt.
Netflix has a movie that takes pretty blatant inspiration from The Spirits Within, but has a Russian super-sci-fi explanation for the ghosts rather than alien ghosts.
yeah, watched it, the first thing that came to my mind was how it was the same as the final fantasy movie
Was it actually good?
nah.
I like it, but it repeats itself with macho military guys losing their shit over being unable to even so much as touch the ghosts, and having Gordon Freeman science up some bullshit to help them survive until he suddenly has everything he needs to deduce the nature of their enemy via some Adam west style bullshittery and finally makes some plasma guns that allow them to fight back. I'm just glad CIA lady wasn't an in your face girlpower type character. I wouldn't mind an actual Half life movie from the same team,
I always thought this movie was just a weird fever dream, I couldnt remember for the life of me what it was called.
I blame this movie for the sudden change of style in final fantasy going from knights and magic in medieval settings to some fricking futuristic bullshit swarming with magic robots
I just want colorful casts of characters again. Now they're all either fully comprised of boy bands or edgelords.
I miss this style even though I loved 12.
actually I stopped playing FF games after 12.
Its mainly due to 7 and especially 8.
8 still keep a very final fantasy like feeling but already going into the point of no return, 7 wasn't even meant to be a final fantasy but square was in some deep shit back then and had to rebrand the project, when FF 12 finally arrived it became the standar for the future final fantasy games
what? 12 is pretty high fantasy, it's set in Ivalice from the FF Tactics series. The most advance technology there was muskets and Airships. 13 was a futuristic fantasy, and 15 was the real world with fantastical elements.
It's funny, my first exposure to anything Final Fantasy was The Spirits Within movie.
I was sort of blown away by it. Blown away by the animation and yet thinking it was kind of boring.
How much longer before digital actors are a thing
Hoe-girlve basically is that sorta. Their 'actresses' have been doled out for advertisements.
Square Enix thought they had fricking Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario on their hands or some shit.
The idea was decent, but for fricks sake much more popular IPs like Scooby Doo already fricking did it. What the hell was Square Enix thinking with some noname OC?
We were robbed.