Vexille

Excellent animation and an interesting story combine in this action sci-fi success. The voice work is sometimes clunky, and the characters are all dull as dishwater. In fact, I can't really tell you about the characters, they are all fairly similar. This results in visually stunning action sequences. But it's hard to feel involved and connect with the characters emotionally. Chases, robot fights, fast and well edited cuts, this is how action scenes should be seen. As a combination of both robot/zombie film, it would have been better for some not so obvious mad scientists. Enjoy the action, and try and make it through the dialogue.

Saw this as world premiere at Locarno festival. In 2K DLP projection on 27m wide screen. Looked very good apart from some aliasing at times. The film borrows visually from "Dune" (sandworms) and some others but it's quite interesting with its mix of not photo realistic and more realistic CGI elements. Will look great on Blue Ray HD disc. The story is about a Japan of the future which has shielded itself from all foreign surveillance for 10 years so nobody knows what is going on. There are suspicions of illegal production of androids by a mega corporation with unclear goals, potentially dangerous to the human race on a global scale.

It's 2067 and Japan has become a nation completely cut off from the rest of the world because it refuses to adhere to a U.N. mandate banning the development and manufacturing of human-like androids. The nation has also set up a sophisticated magnetic force field that effectively bars all outsiders from entering its borders. S.W.O.R.D. is a secret U.S. special forces team sent in to find out what diabolical activities are occurring on the inside. The main character, Vexille, is a feisty female member of this special ops force.

"Vexille" is a stylish and energetic dystopian fantasy, marked by imaginative storytelling, exciting action sequences, and animation that is a canny mixture of art deco, Soviet-era agitprop - with its heavy emphasis on facial shadowing - and technology-based futurism. Nicely done.

Okay, so if you've read all of the other reviews then you know that the animation of this film is AWESOME! It's an excellent step forward for hybrid animation. Also, though not all of the reviewers agree, my opinion of the action in this film was that it was sweet and sick (in the most radical fashion.) For the animation and action alone, this film is totally worth the price of a rental. Which brings us to the plot of the film; while some reviewers thought the plot was empty or lacked merit, I am of the opinion that those reviewers probably didn't pay attention to all of the dialog. The plot was well developed, more believable than several of the big-budget live-action Hollywood films (such as The Happening, which totally sucked,) and played along the social issue of fear of technological invasiveness quite nicely, though it was a rather formulaic script. The dialog was a little weak, and there wasn't much for serious character development, but the nonverbal scripting played quite well. After all, this was an animated action flick, and quite frankly it was one of the better offerings from the anime genre in recent years. To recap, this is worth the cost of the rental if only for the visual imagery. However, if you have a well developed sensibility for the suspension of disbelief, then you will also likely enjoy the story as a whole. I know that I certainly did.

This is so far the biggest problem with Japanese animé: weak character development, mediocre and plain dialog that seems to be aimed towards children under 10 years of age, redundant stories, characters that look too much alike - we get it that it's a style, but some of the character look like cheap duplicates of one another like Maria & Vexille.

The animation itself wasn't that bad, although it seems like there hasn't been much improvement for the past 7 years... the people are still stiff and have a dead look from time to time, the kissing scene between two main characters was very stiff and unnatural like two dolls kissing.

The effects were nice and definitely passable, but the weak plot of the movie is tiring.

now last, but not least, is the music... it didn't fit with the scenes, totally random and seemed to be there just because someone liked the sound and not how it fit with the story...