Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Encyclopedia
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 video game
s. It was the first photorealistic computer animated
feature film and also holds the record for the most expensive video game-inspired film ever made. 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 141,964 frames
. It took a staff of 200 and 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, and has been called a box office bomb
.
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.
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. The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER
. 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.
Square accumulated four SGI
Origin 2000
series servers, four Onyx2
systems, and 167 Octane
workstations for the film's production. 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. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film. It is estimated that over the film's four year production, approximately 200 people working on it put in a combined 120 years of work.
From early on, it had been decided that The Spirits Within would be filmed entirely in English. 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. Sakaguchi stated he was pleased with the film's final cut, saying he would not have changed anything if given the chance. The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs while maintaining staff salaries. The film's final cost of $
137 million blew out from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million.
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.
. 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 such as her age for such appearances.
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. 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." 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. Sato concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "she's a lot cuter".
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."
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. 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. 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.
The Spirits Within holds a 44% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes
based on 143 reviews (62 positive, 81 negative), where the consensus is the film "raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed". Similarly it has a weighted score of 49/100 at Metacritic
based on 28 professional reviews. The film was nominated for "Best Sound Editing – Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign" at the Golden Reel Awards as well as "Best Animated Feature" by the Online Film Critics Society
but did not win either award.
Roger Ebert
was a strong advocate of the film; he gave it 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." 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.
Entertainment Weekly named Aki an "it girl
", stating that "Calling this action heroine a cartoon would be like calling a Rembrandt a doodle." 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. Her appearance has been received positively by critics, with praise for the finer details of the character model such as the rendering of her hair. 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
. 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
. 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". 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 girl
s and "transformed [...] into an erotic fantasy machine." 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.
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.
. 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. The film's soundtrack was recorded in the United Kingdom at the Watford
Coloseum and the London
AIR
Lyndhurst Hall. It was mixed at the Manhattan Center
Studios in the United States. In the liner notes to the album, Goldenthal describes the soundtrack as combining "orchestration techniques associated with the late 20th-century Polish avant-garde, as well as my own experiments from ALIEN 3, and 19th-century Straussian brass and string instrumentation."
The album was met with extremely positive reviews. Neil Shurley from Allmusic, who gave the album 4 out of 5, stated the album would probably have been nominated for an Oscar if the film itself had been more popular, as did the reviewer from Soundtrack-express.com, who gave the soundtrack 5 out of 5. Tracksounds.com gave the soundtrack 10 out of 10, stating the feel of the album was "expansive and majestic". Filmtracks.com gave the film 4 out of 5, calling it "an easy album to recommend", adding "parts of it will blow you out of your seat." Dan Goldwasser from Soundtrack.net also gave the film 4 out of 5, calling it a "must have".
The album peaked at No. 19 on Billboard
s Top Soundtracks list and No. 193 on the Billboard 200
on July 28, 2001. The track "The Dream Within" was nominated for "Best Original Song Written for a Film" at the World Soundtrack Awards
.
and published by Pocket Books
in June 2001. The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a companion book, was published by BradyGames in August 2001. Edited by Steven L. Kent
, the 240 page color book contains a foreword by director Sakaguchi and extensive information on all aspects of the film's creation, including concept art, storyboards, the script, sets and props, layout, motion capture and animation.
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...
directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi
Hironobu Sakaguchi
is a Japanese game designer, game director and game producer. He is world famous as the creator of the Final Fantasy series, and has had a long career in gaming with over 100 million units of video games sold worldwide...
, creator of the Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy
is a media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, and is developed and owned by Square Enix . The franchise centers on a series of fantasy and science-fantasy role-playing video games , but includes motion pictures, anime, printed media, and other merchandise...
series of role-playing video game
Role-playing video game
Role-playing video games are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests...
s. It was the first photorealistic computer animated
Computer animation
Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images....
feature film and also holds the record for the most expensive video game-inspired film ever made. It features the voices of Ming-Na
Ming-Na
Ming-Na is a Macanese-born American actress. She has been credited with and without her family name, but most credits since the late 1990s have been without it...
, Alec Baldwin
Alec Baldwin
Alexander Rae "Alec" Baldwin III is an American actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television.Baldwin first gained recognition through television for his work in the soap opera Knots Landing in the role of Joshua Rush. He was a cast member for two seasons before his character was killed off...
, Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
, James Woods
James Woods
James Howard Woods is an American film, stage and television actor. Woods is known for starring in critically acclaimed films such as Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador, Nixon, Ghosts of Mississippi, Casino, and in the television legal drama Shark. He has won three Emmy Awards, and has gained...
, Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames
Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
, Peri Gilpin
Peri Gilpin
Peri Gilpin is an American actress known for her role as Roz Doyle in the U.S. television series Frasier from 1993 until 2004. Along with the principal cast, Gilpin won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2000...
and Steve Buscemi
Steve Buscemi
Steven Vincent "Steve" Buscemi is an American actor, writer and film director. An associate member of the renowned experimental theater company The Wooster Group, Buscemi has starred and supported in successful Hollywood and indie films including New York Stories, Mystery Train, Reservoir Dogs,...
. The Spirits Within follows scientists Aki Ross
Aki Ross
is a fictional character in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, voiced by Chinese American actress Ming-Na. She was expected to be the first photorealistic computer-generated "actress" to appear in multiple movies in different roles....
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
Render farm
A render farm is a computer cluster built to render computer-generated imagery , typically for film and television visual effects, using off-line batch processing. This is different from a render wall, which is a networked, tiled display used for real-time rendering...
consisting of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames
Film frame
In filmmaking, video production, animation, and related fields, a film frame or video frame is one of the many still images which compose the complete moving picture...
. It took a staff of 200 and 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
Box office
A box office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through an unblocked hole through a wall or window, or at a wicket....
. The film is blamed for the demise of Square Pictures, and has been called a box office bomb
Box office bomb
The phrase box office bomb refers to a film for which the production and marketing costs greatly exceeded the revenue regained by the movie studio. This should not be confused with Hollywood accounting when official figures show large losses, yet the movie is a financial success.A film's financial...
.
Plot
In the year 2065, a future EarthEarth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
is infested by Phantoms: alien
Extraterrestrial life
Extraterrestrial life is defined as life that does not originate from Earth...
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
Aki Ross
is a fictional character in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, voiced by Chinese American actress Ming-Na. She was expected to be the first photorealistic computer-generated "actress" to appear in multiple movies in different roles....
(Ming-Na
Ming-Na
Ming-Na is a Macanese-born American actress. She has been credited with and without her family name, but most credits since the late 1990s have been without it...
) and her mentor, Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland
Donald Sutherland
Donald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
), 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
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
when she is cornered by Phantoms but is rescued by Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin
Alec Baldwin
Alexander Rae "Alec" Baldwin III is an American actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television.Baldwin first gained recognition through television for his work in the soap opera Knots Landing in the role of Joshua Rush. He was a cast member for two seasons before his character was killed off...
) and his squad "Deep Eyes", consisting of Ryan Whittaker (Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames
Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
), Neil Fleming (Steve Buscemi
Steve Buscemi
Steven Vincent "Steve" Buscemi is an American actor, writer and film director. An associate member of the renowned experimental theater company The Wooster Group, Buscemi has starred and supported in successful Hollywood and indie films including New York Stories, Mystery Train, Reservoir Dogs,...
) and Jane Proudfoot (Peri Gilpin
Peri Gilpin
Peri Gilpin is an American actress known for her role as Roz Doyle in the U.S. television series Frasier from 1993 until 2004. Along with the principal cast, Gilpin won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2000...
). 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
James Woods
James Howard Woods is an American film, stage and television actor. Woods is known for starring in critically acclaimed films such as Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador, Nixon, Ghosts of Mississippi, Casino, and in the television legal drama Shark. He has won three Emmy Awards, and has gained...
), 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
Gaia hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.The scientific investigation of the...
. 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. Ming-Na, who found the role via her publicist, said she felt like she had given birth with her voice to the character. 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. The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER
ER (TV series)
ER is an American medical drama television series created by novelist Michael Crichton that aired on NBC from September 19, 1994 to April 2, 2009. It was produced by Constant c Productions and Amblin Entertainment, in association with Warner Bros. Television...
. 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.
Square accumulated four SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
Origin 2000
SGI Origin 2000
The SGI Origin 2000, code named Lego, is a family of mid-range and high-end servers developed and manufactured by SGI and introduced in 1996 to succeed the SGI Challenge and POWER Challenge. At the time of introduction, these systems ran IRIX 6.4 and later, IRIX 6.5. A variant of the Origin 2000...
series servers, four Onyx2
SGI Onyx2
The SGI Onyx2, code name Kego, is a family of visualization systems developed and manufactured by SGI, introduced in 1996 to succeed the Onyx. The Onyx2's basic system architecture is based on the Origin 2000 servers, but with the notable inclusion of graphics hardware. In 2000, the Onyx2 was...
systems, and 167 Octane
SGI Octane
The Octane and the similar Octane2 are UNIX workstations marketed by SGI. Both are 2-way SMP-capable workstations, originally based on the MIPS R10000 microprocessor. Newer Octanes are based on MIPS R12000 and R14000. The Octane2 has four improvements compared to Octane, a revised power supply,...
workstations for the film's production. The basic film was rendered at a home-made render farm
Render farm
A render farm is a computer cluster built to render computer-generated imagery , typically for film and television visual effects, using off-line batch processing. This is different from a render wall, which is a networked, tiled display used for real-time rendering...
created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III
Pentium III
The Pentium III brand refers to Intel's 32-bit x86 desktop and mobile microprocessors based on the sixth-generation P6 microarchitecture introduced on February 26, 1999. The brand's initial processors were very similar to the earlier Pentium II-branded microprocessors...
-933 MHz workstations. Animation was filmed using motion capture
Motion capture
Motion capture, motion tracking, or mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics...
technology. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film. It is estimated that over the film's four year production, approximately 200 people working on it put in a combined 120 years of work.
From early on, it had been decided that The Spirits Within would be filmed entirely in English. In order to keep the film in line with Hironobu Sakaguchi
Hironobu Sakaguchi
is a Japanese game designer, game director and game producer. He is world famous as the creator of the Final Fantasy series, and has had a long career in gaming with over 100 million units of video games sold worldwide...
's vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production. Sakaguchi stated he was pleased with the film's final cut, saying he would not have changed anything if given the chance. The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs while maintaining staff salaries. The film's final cost of $
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
137 million blew out from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million.
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.
Cast
- Ming-NaMing-NaMing-Na is a Macanese-born American actress. She has been credited with and without her family name, but most credits since the late 1990s have been without it...
as Aki RossAki Rossis a fictional character in the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, voiced by Chinese American actress Ming-Na. She was expected to be the first photorealistic computer-generated "actress" to appear in multiple movies in different roles.... - Alec BaldwinAlec BaldwinAlexander Rae "Alec" Baldwin III is an American actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television.Baldwin first gained recognition through television for his work in the soap opera Knots Landing in the role of Joshua Rush. He was a cast member for two seasons before his character was killed off...
as Gray Edwards - Ving RhamesVing RhamesIrving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
as Ryan - Steve BuscemiSteve BuscemiSteven Vincent "Steve" Buscemi is an American actor, writer and film director. An associate member of the renowned experimental theater company The Wooster Group, Buscemi has starred and supported in successful Hollywood and indie films including New York Stories, Mystery Train, Reservoir Dogs,...
as Neil - Peri GilpinPeri GilpinPeri Gilpin is an American actress known for her role as Roz Doyle in the U.S. television series Frasier from 1993 until 2004. Along with the principal cast, Gilpin won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2000...
as Jane - Donald SutherlandDonald SutherlandDonald McNichol Sutherland, OC is a Canadian actor with a film career spanning nearly 50 years. Some of Sutherland's more notable movie roles included offbeat warriors in such war movies as The Dirty Dozen, , MASH , and Kelly's Heroes , as well as in such popular films as Klute, Invasion of the...
as Doctor Sid - James WoodsJames WoodsJames Howard Woods is an American film, stage and television actor. Woods is known for starring in critically acclaimed films such as Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador, Nixon, Ghosts of Mississippi, Casino, and in the television legal drama Shark. He has won three Emmy Awards, and has gained...
as General Hein - Keith DavidKeith DavidKeith David Williams , better known as Keith David, is an American film, television, voice actor, and singer. He is perhaps most known for his live-action roles in such films as Crash, There's Something About Mary, Barbershop and Men at Work...
as Council Member #1 - Jean SimmonsJean SimmonsJean Merilyn Simmons, OBE was an English actress. She appeared predominantly in motion pictures, beginning with films made in Great Britain during and after World War II – she was one of J...
as Concil Member #2 - Matt McKenzieMatt McKenzieMatt McKenzie is an actor best known for his voicework in games and movies. He is the voice of Auron in the RPG games Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and Kingdom Hearts II...
as Major Elliot
Character design
The model for Aki was designed to closely follow human appearance, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview "I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human." Each of her 60,000 hairs was separately and fully animated and rendered, her entire model was estimated to be made up of around 400,000 polygonsPolygon (computer graphics)
Polygons are used in computer graphics to compose images that are three-dimensional in appearance. Usually triangular, polygons arise when an object's surface is modeled, vertices are selected, and the object is rendered in a wire frame model. This is quicker to display than a shaded model; thus...
. 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 such as her age for such appearances.
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. 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
Supermodel
The term supermodel refers to a highly-paid fashion model who usually has a worldwide reputation and often a background in haute couture and commercial modeling. The term became prominent in the popular culture of the 1980s. Supermodels usually work for top fashion designers and labels...
" looking character in favor of an appearance that would "convince people that she's a scientist." 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. Sato concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "she's a lot cuter".
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
Uncanny Valley
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers...
". 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."
Reception
Before the film's release there was already skepticism of its potential to be financially successful; Time magazineTime (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
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. 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. 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.
The Spirits Within holds a 44% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
based on 143 reviews (62 positive, 81 negative), where the consensus is the film "raises the bar for computer animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed". Similarly it has a weighted score of 49/100 at Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
based on 28 professional reviews. The film was nominated for "Best Sound Editing – Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign" at the Golden Reel Awards as well as "Best Animated Feature" by the Online Film Critics Society
Online Film Critics Society
The Online Film Critics Society is a professional association for film critics who publish their reviews, interviews, and essays on the Internet.The OFCS was founded in 1997...
but did not win either award.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
was a strong advocate of the film; he gave it 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
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
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." 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.
Entertainment Weekly named Aki an "it girl
It girl
"It girl" is a term for a young woman who possess the quality "It", absolute attraction.The early usage of the concept "it" in this meaning may be seen in a story by Rudyard Kipling: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."...
", stating that "Calling this action heroine a cartoon would be like calling a Rembrandt a doodle." She was voted to be one of the sexiest women ever by Maxim
Maxim (magazine)
Maxim is an international men's magazine based in the United Kingdom and known for its pictorials featuring popular actresses, singers, and female models, sometimes pictured dressed, often pictured scantily dressed but not fully nude....
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. Her appearance has been received positively by critics, with praise for the finer details of the character model such as the rendering of her hair. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
described her as having the "sinewy efficiency" of Aliens franchise character Ellen Ripley
Ellen Ripley
Ellen Ripley is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Alien film series played by American actress Sigourney Weaver. The character was heralded as a seminal role for challenging gender roles, particularly in the science fiction genre, and remains Weaver's most famous role to...
and visual appeal of Julia Roberts
Julia Roberts
Julia Fiona Roberts is an American actress. She became a Hollywood star after headlining the romantic comedy Pretty Woman , which grossed $464 million worldwide...
' portrayal of Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich-Ellis is an American legal clerk and environmental activist who, despite the lack of a formal law school education, or any legal education, was instrumental in constructing a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California in 1993...
. 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
Lara Croft
Lara Croft is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Square Enix video game series Tomb Raider. She is presented as a beautiful, intelligent, and athletic British archaeologist-adventurer who ventures into ancient, hazardous tombs and ruins around the world...
. 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". 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 girl
Pin-up girl
A pin-up girl, also known as a pin-up model, is a model whose mass-produced pictures see wide appeal as popular culture. Pin-ups are intended for informal display, e.g. meant to be "pinned-up" on a wall...
s and "transformed [...] into an erotic fantasy machine." 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.
The merger between Square
Square Co.
was a Japanese video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. It merged with Enix in 2003 and became part of Square Enix...
and Enix
Enix
The was a Japanese company that produced video games, anime and manga. The company was founded by Yasuhiro Fukushima on September 22, 1975 as and renamed Enix in 1982...
, which had been under consideration since at least 2000 according to the then Enix chairman Yasuhiro Fukushima
Yasuhiro Fukushima
is the founder of Japanese video game software giant Enix and largest shareholder of the company's successor, Square Enix following Enix's merger with Square Co., Ltd...
, 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.
Related media
The soundtrack to the film was released on July 3, 2001 by Sony MusicSony Music Entertainment
Sony Music Entertainment ' is the second-largest global recorded music company of the "big four" record companies and is controlled by Sony Corporation of America, the United States subsidiary of Japan's Sony Corporation....
. It was composed by Elliot Goldenthal
Elliot Goldenthal
Elliot Goldenthal is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a student of Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, and is best known for his distinctive style and ability to blend various musical styles and techniques in original and inventive ways...
, with the performing orchestra conducted by Belgian composer Dirk Brossé
Dirk Brossé
Dirk Brossé is a Flemish Belgian composer and conductor. He’s one of Europe's most talented composers. Since 1999 Brossé is Musical Host of the International Flanders Film Festival in Ghent and he held also the title of Music Director of the Tokyo International Music Festival.Brossé is best known...
. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi opted for the acclaimed film composer instead of Nobuo Uematsu
Nobuo Uematsu
is a Japanese video game composer, best known for scoring the majority of titles in the Final Fantasy series. He is considered as one of the most famous and respected composers in the video game community...
, 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. The film's soundtrack was recorded in the United Kingdom at the Watford
Watford
Watford is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, situated northwest of central London and within the bounds of the M25 motorway. The borough is separated from Greater London to the south by the urbanised parish of Watford Rural in the Three Rivers District.Watford was created as an urban...
Coloseum and the London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
AIR
Associated Independent Recording
Associated Independent Recording , an independent recording company, was founded in London in 1965 by Beatles producer George Martin and his partner John Burgess after their departure from EMI....
Lyndhurst Hall. It was mixed at the Manhattan Center
Manhattan Center
The Manhattan Center building, built in 1906 and located at 311 West 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan, houses Manhattan Center Studios , its Grand Ballroom, and the Hammerstein Ballroom, one of New York City's most renowned performance venues...
Studios in the United States. In the liner notes to the album, Goldenthal describes the soundtrack as combining "orchestration techniques associated with the late 20th-century Polish avant-garde, as well as my own experiments from ALIEN 3, and 19th-century Straussian brass and string instrumentation."
The album was met with extremely positive reviews. Neil Shurley from Allmusic, who gave the album 4 out of 5, stated the album would probably have been nominated for an Oscar if the film itself had been more popular, as did the reviewer from Soundtrack-express.com, who gave the soundtrack 5 out of 5. Tracksounds.com gave the soundtrack 10 out of 10, stating the feel of the album was "expansive and majestic". Filmtracks.com gave the film 4 out of 5, calling it "an easy album to recommend", adding "parts of it will blow you out of your seat." Dan Goldwasser from Soundtrack.net also gave the film 4 out of 5, calling it a "must have".
The album peaked at No. 19 on Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
s Top Soundtracks list and No. 193 on the Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
on July 28, 2001. The track "The Dream Within" was nominated for "Best Original Song Written for a Film" at the World Soundtrack Awards
World Soundtrack Academy
The World Soundtrack Academy , launched in 2001 by the Flanders International Film Festival Ghent, is aimed at organizing and overseeing the educational, cultural and professional aspects of the art of film music, including the preservation of the history of the soundtrack and its worldwide promotion...
.
Novelization
A novelization was written by Dean Wesley SmithDean Wesley Smith
Dean Wesley Smith is a science fiction author, known primarily for his Star Trek novels, movie novelizations, and other novels of licensed properties such as Smallville, Spider-Man, X-Men, Aliens, Roswell, Men in Black, and Quantum Leap...
and published by Pocket Books
Pocket Books
Pocket Books is a division of Simon & Schuster that primarily publishes paperback books.- History :Pocket produced the first mass-market, pocket-sized paperback books in America in early 1939 and revolutionized the publishing industry...
in June 2001. The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a companion book, was published by BradyGames in August 2001. Edited by Steven L. Kent
Steven L. Kent
Steven L. Kent is an American writer, known for both video game journalism and military science fiction novels. In 1993, Steven started work as a freelance journalist, writing monthly video game reviews for the Seattle Times...
, the 240 page color book contains a foreword by director Sakaguchi and extensive information on all aspects of the film's creation, including concept art, storyboards, the script, sets and props, layout, motion capture and animation.