Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Now the graphics are not particularly impressive anymore, but at one time the picture was really amazing. I remember when I was a kid, I just wiped the tape of this movie to the holes. It's a great story with a very beautiful ending, and the musical theme at the end still sounds very poignant.

And here's the moment where it all started, and for the first time, a rabid schipper woke up in me. 😅

My eternal love for Final Fantasy has led me to this movie since my early childhood :)

A very, very underrated cartoon. It became one of the first CGI films featuring humans rather than anthropomorphic animals, while seriously outperforming its competitors in terms of picture quality (if you look at a Dinosaur from about the same period, the difference is obvious). He presented a story that was not the most banal, with convincing drama, and he also got one of the most striking soundtracks. And ... failed at the box office with an extraordinary bang.

Critics hint that the audience was just too dumb for such films, saying the plot is too complicated, not all adults understand it, not like children. Well, let's not offend the mass market. Of course, he doesn't know anything about it, but he's not that stupid. Rather, it played a role that fans of the Final Fantasy franchise then clearly expected to see their next fairy tale, not a dystopia. Even the slogan of the painting "No more fairy tales, this is reality" did not help. As a result, they were not only disappointed, but even offended in their expectations.

The audience, which is far from the idolatry of Final Fantasy, was somewhat discouraged by the bleakness of the proposed story. The cartoon is the same, and after it you want to go out the window with longing. The control shot is a SPOILER!!!! - the death of one of the key characters. Blasphemously, the camera promises the usual Hollywood miracle with a sudden resurrection and a sea of tears, but this never happens, and the viewer listens in a depressed state to the nasal howls of Lara Fabian in the credits.

And yet, for me, this is one of my favorite CGI ever. I'm happy to review it over and over again. Because for me, that's the way to tell stories, without going along with the mass market and its claims about how to properly feel sorry for their emotions. I don't remember the plot of the Dinosaur at all, but the Spirits inside can almost retell it frame by frame. Because it's memorable!