Gen¹³

With a little polishing, this could have been a really good film.

At first glance, Gen 13 seems to have all the right ingredients: Quality voice talent from Alicia Witt (Twin Peaks), John de Lancie (Q from "Star Trek: Next Generation"), Mark Hamill (duh!) and even Cloris Leachman. It also has a good plot, taken almost verbatim from the pages of Jim Lee and J. Scott Campbell's "Gen 13" comic book mini-series.

Kevin Altieri's past experience with the "Batman" animated series is obvious, mostly keeping the story moving at a good clip.

But this movie views as though the money behind it suddenly lost interest during the final stages. Although there are several good lines, "We're like... the 'Justice League,' man", the voices are not well mixed and, at times, need additional coaching. Background noises mix in and out at random. The "Grunge" character is poorly scripted as the well-meaning dope and Flea fails to give him any personality.

The music weighs everything down. It sounds more like the soundtrack for a Saturday morning cartoon than an 82-minute feature film.

Despite all that, the visuals are really pretty good. Fairchild is still the busty titan and Freefall the good-hearted bad girl. And they are still fun to look at.

Like I said, it seems unfinished.

This movie does stay very close to the comics. There is one major change involving Fairchild, but under the circumstances it's an understandable one. It's really great when you're watching the movie and thinking, "I remember this scene from the comics!"

The voices are mostly pretty good. Mark Hamil is awesome as Threshold! My only complaints are that Flea makes Grunge sound way to dumb and Bobby only gets a cameo. Oh well, at least Rainmaker got a few lines...

I've known Kevin Altieri for decades. He spent a pile of his own money premiering this film years ago only to see the thing crammed into a vault at Disney because Wildstorm Comics, the publisher of the Gen 13 series, sold itself to DC Comics (owned by Time-Warner) and Disney decided it would rather eat the cost of the film than help sell a rival conglomerate's merchandise. So, an entire film swallowed whole due to studio politics. Amazingly, years later, it still sits, only viewable as a bootleg because of a minor release in Australia and Europe. Kevin just shakes his head at the waste. He did quite a job on this considering the limits of the budget. The uncut version does not feature nudity except in the slightest cheesecake variety. I disagree with a fellow poster regarding the music. Amotz Plessner (from the Czech Republic) provided an excellent score with none of the usual tinny synthesizer drivel typically larded over action-adventure animation. As for any heavy-breathing lesbian characters or material, you have to consider that this film was financed by Disney, so what would you expect? Sure, this film is not Miyazaki, or something worthy of putting in the Smithsonian, but it is a well-made little feature. And though I haven't seen the bootleg version(s) available for download, I'd be suspicious of the quality (although the original not being available it would be impossible to tell at this point).

Gen 13 is not a perfect movie, it feels a lot more like setup for a television series than a movie, but with that said there is enough here to justify a viewing,including some terrific animation directed by Batman: TAS and Mask of the Phantasm director Kevin Altieri. Unfortunately the movie was never officially released in the U.S. due to Jim Lee selling his Wildstorm imprint to Time Warner's DC while the movie was in production. Once Disney found out about the sale the film was shelved out of a desire not to promote a film with commercial ties to a competing company and has only popped up on a handful of PAL releases and broadcasts on foreign television. Even if this movie isn't perfect, it still deserves to be available and hopefully one day one of independent distributors like Shout! or Kino will be able to give this film the home media release it deserves.

I heard about Gen13 the comic book but I can't find it in Thailand so I don't know the storyline in the comic.

I saw this cartoon today and I love it. The story is great. Mark Hamill's voice as Threshold is so powerful.

If you are a fan of Gen13 or like comic books, you should see this cartoon.