escoles

This is a confused and confusing adaptation, wherein stylish minimalism substitutes for story and meaningless special effects replace plot elements until the story is more or less completely gone.

A key plot event, for example, entails utterly unexplained and un-anticipatable magical powers being deployed, where Andersen's original invokes more poignant and symbolically instructive natural cycles.

The writers of this adaptation transform a story with powerful symbolic resonance into a bad Saturday morning cartoon.

Instead of this I strongly recommend you seek out some version of the 1959 Lev Atmotov / Nikolai Fyodorov adaptation, which preserves the symbolic power of Andersen's material.

I have had the dubious privilege of seeing an excellent production of this profoundly mediocre play. While I'm not a Hoff-Hater, I sincerely doubt that even Al Pacino could improve it. The music is occasionally pleasant, but always highly derivative (it sounds like every other Broadway play ever made); the pop-philosophical mauling of Stephenson's idea is offensively simplistic; the plot "twists" manage to be at once predictable, heavy-handed, and misogynistic (my young niece perceptively mis-observed: "All the womens died").

If you're looking for a good musical, look somewhere else. If you're looking for a good, interesting interpretation of the Jekyll-Hyde story, look to the Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing vehicle "I, Monster", which makes genuinely interesting and creative changes to Stephenson's idea. ("Hyde:Jekyll" becomes "Blake:Marlowe", for example, to highlight the Faustian and gnostic aspects of the story.) It's a typical '60s low-budget screamer, but at that, it has ten times the heart of this vacuous product.

I agree with an earlier reviewer that both hardcore Oshii fans and narrow-minded American viewers are missing the point by not viewing this movie on its own terms. In many ways, it's more thoroughly conceived, and less action-justified (more thoughtful) than Ghost in the Shell. For me, it progressed naturally from its predecessor: Where Ghost in the Shell asks questions about the nature of human individuality, Innocence asks the next set of questions, about human existence. And it asks them in ways so much more directly pertinent to our own lives than utterly fantastic treatments like the Matrix films and silly diversions like The Butterfly Effect.

The ideas of the story are genuinely original, and thoroughly conceived. I don't think I've ever seen a science fiction film that was as true to the real spirit of the genre as this pair; Japan in general seems to take science fiction much more seriously than any western film-culture, and so out of Japan we get real, serious attempts to tell science-fictional stories, filled with real ideas and real characters, instead of the Bat-Durstonized monstrosities we get in the west.

For me, the integration of 2D and 3D elements was jarring; but the story stands on its ideas and the strength of its plot.