Alright, I have just finished watched Appleseed, picked up my jaw from the floor, read the negative reviews on IMDB, cursed the clueless, extremist manga fanboys under my breath and ready to write a review.

Although the story of this movie is indeed full of cliches, visually the movie looks simply amazing. The backgrounds look almost photo-realistic but the models are cell-shaded. Personally I think they look no different than the usual anime style. Unlike other anime movies, however, the creators of Appleseed push CGI technology to it's limit. They use motion-capture, lip-synch bloom, blur... When I saw Olympus 5 for the first time, I could not believe they would model an entire city in 3d! There are often cases of misusing of mo-cap but in Appleseed every character's movement speaks of the character itself. The poses and facial expressions are varied: the mouth isn't limited to open/closed animations thanks to lip-synch. I eventually found the story above average. Not fantastic, but it's better than most Hollywood movies, for example. I'd reccomend Appleseed to everyone, even people who do not like manga or anime. This the third anime I liked in my whole life (Puss in Boots does not count: it's a classic <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />) and that, coming from someone who usually has a high dislike of manga/anime is a praise <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />.

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