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When the film industry was in its infancy, the mere presence of "moving pictures" was enough to keep audiences spellbound. A pre-1900 viewer marveled at a film that simply showed a seashore: amazing, he said, how much the waves on the screen resembled real waves. The same was true of early animation, as Hugh Kenner observes in his wonderful book Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings:
Moviegoers had a passion. … for nothing more subtle than the sheer illusion of motion. It sufficed that on a wavery screen they saw—galloping horses! (And therein lay the germ of the Western.) Chuck Jones remembers when it was hilarious if an animated walker just hopped once in a while, an effect he's used himself in several films. A story? That could emerge from whatever some animator happened to think of next.
A similar logic seems to have been at work in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first animated feature in which the protagonists are "played" by nearly lifelike digital actors. Is it enough simply to watch animated characters who look so uncannily real—and never mind the cobbled-together story, the excruciating dialogue? Not just the characters, for that matter, but also the ravaged streets of post-apocalypse New York, the lifting rockets, the dreamscapes with their preternatural clarity of detail, realer than real, like the great sci-fi cover art of Paul Lehr and John Berkey and Robert Andre. (And isn't the banality of the title and subtitle sufficient warning for those who wouldn't be satisfied by skin of almost human texture?) Maybe it is enough. But in any case there's another compelling reason to pay attention.
The front page of The New York Times for July 17 showed the interior of the first artificial heart. (In its June 23 issue, The Economist reports that "every part of the human body is being studied to see how it can be replicated artificially.") The cover of the August issue of Wired shows the wheelchair-bound writer John Hockenberry coming at you, kamikaze-style, framed by a mini-manifesto: "Your body. Get over it." (Inside, Hockenberry explains: "Bodies are perhaps an arbitrary evolutionary solution to issues of mobility and communication." Hence the disabled—wedded to assistive technology—are leading the way for the rest of humanity, heralding "a whole range of biological-machine hybrids.") And at the local cineplex this summer, you could take in a matinee of Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, break for nachos, migrate a couple of screens down the hallway for the carnage of Jurassic Park III (live action seamlessly melded with superbly plausible computer-generated images), pick up a hot dog and a Coke, and finish the night with Final Fantasy.
Clearly something's afoot, some mind-bending change in the rules that heretofore have neatly distinguished the real from the simulated and the human from the not-human, the rules that have defined the nature and the boundaries of the body and its relation to soul or spirit or self. "Movie Stars Fear Inroads by Upstart Digital Actors" reads the headline of another New York Times article (July 8), illustrated with a still from Final Fantasy. Did a rogue tabloid writer or maybe a wit from The Onion hack into the Times? No, the story is straight. "I'm very troubled by it," Tom Hanks is quoted as saying. Could this movie offer insight into whatever it is we're in the midst of?
Four years in the making at the Square Pictures studio in Honolulu, Final Fantasy takes its name from the enormously popular series of computer games created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, who was also the principal architect of the movie. (The first version of the game appeared in 1987; the release of Final Fantasy X, scheduled for this spring, was pushed back a bit.) The link between the film version and the games is a sensibility, a style of visual storytelling strongly influenced not only by anime (Japanese animation, a whole universe of its own, ranging from the confections of Pokemon to darker, deeper films like Akira and Princess Mononoke) but also by Sakaguchi's passion for movies in general. The "world" of the film Final Fantasy and its characters are not based on any of the games.
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