This is some of the most fabulous 3D animation I have seen in a long time! I highly recommend everyone check this film out. Seems the English dubbed version might not be here until January, however you can find copies of the official Japanese release of this film thru Ebay or those who deal in Anime. It comes with English or Chinese subtitling. It is simply a gorgeous movie!

The Final Fantasy movies are great. Hard to tell the figures are animated at times.

Attached Link: http://www.stevengiesler.com/index_old.html

I agree, the FF movies are awesome. You might find the website above interesting. It's by one of the artists who worked on the "Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within" movie, and some stuff for "Animatrix".

Attached Link: http://www.cortinadigital.com/

Here's another guy who did a lot of models and texturing for Final Fantasy films. Beware, this website is all Flash-based. Can be a bitch to navigate, but the images in the gallery are well worth it. ;-)

Thanks for the links! This film was simply gorgeous in detail of landscapes and fluid motion. It was awesome! Here's an image from the film from the offical site.

talking about that i just got this movie lastnight and i havent watched it yet... but damn this image dont do the film justice i will soon capture a really good screen so u can see how nice and crispy it really is

I hope they release this in some theatres, and not just straight to DVD, it looks like a major Freak'n Cool production! ^ ^;

I saw this movie with english subtitles, and i gotta tell you.. it's BREATHTAKING. Everything, the modelling, the textures (wow, just wow!), the hair (omg!), etc.
If you get a chance.. see it! It will make your day.

I have to find a place that has it because I have been interested in it for a while.

I didn't know there was any other FF movies other than "The Spirits Within."

seen it, loved it.

This genre tends to produce movies that are major box-office flops, no matter how technically excellent they may be. hence it is safer just to send it straight to the video retailers than to waste money advertising a theatrical release, given the narrow demographic to which it will appeal. if the screencap above is representative, I daresay it might do well in dvd sales and P2P downloads.

Nice graphics. Too bad the story stank. :( And sadly enough, based on its target demographic, it's most likely to suffer significantly from P2P downloaders.

"Spirits Within" did not do well over here, even though the graphics were spectacular. The story just didn't have appeal over here. However Advent Children is based on the characters from the Final Fantasy 7 game, who have remained very popular despite the game going to version ten and then to Online play only. When the original game came out, there were even a few poser versions of Cloud, Yufie, and Red13. My fave from the game was Vincent.

I was not aware that a 3d movie had been done and released in Japan until I was up in Vancourver here last month. My friend and I stopped into a comic book store and we were just leaving when I looked over and saw this incredible 3d image on the cover of an Anime magazine. I bought the magazine and there was a 3 page article on the movie with some breath-taking screen shots. Up there, according to their big record/video store HMV, the english translation DVD will be in sometime this month. According to Amazon.com, it will be availabe in the US in January of 2006. I decided to hunt Ebay for the english subtitled version and bought two copies from a vender who deals in anime direct from Japan. And the 3d work in the film is just incredibly awesome!!!!! There is also a series of 12" dolls being sold for the game. Series one had Vincent, so I bought him while I was up in Canada.

Last night I was tinkering with Poser, and interestingly enough, if you have the Bishon figure and his custom morphs for M3, you can get pretty close to Cloud Strife's face, now if someone would make the hair from that picture I posted before, I could have a good Poser Cloud....

Here's Vincent by the way. In the original game, he was a bonus character (you know, go to a certain room in a building and reply to his questions in just the right way and then he would join your party). However he became an instant hit over in Japan and with Final Fantasy players over here. The article I read, says that in 2006, there will a game featuring him as the main character.

Message edited on: 11/20/2005 17:24

I think the NA version was to be release at the end of Nov, but it was delayed to Jan 06. So I hope it makes it out in January. I picked up Newtype USA Oct 10, which has a nice article, and a trailer on the sample DVD. I hope the story is good cause the Animation is state of the art.

"I hope the story is good cause the Animation is state of the art." If you haven't played FF7, then you may not get much bang from it story-wise. They had written the movie specifically for the fans, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but they made little effort to extend a hand to audiences who would not be familiar to FF7. Therefore, the significance and dramatic impact of the events in the film and would probably be lost on most audiences which is a shame.

The visuals were quite spectacular and the movie is incredible from a technical standpoint. But IMO, I found the animation direction just a little too much on the "gimmicky" side of things. It's like they pulled every CG trick in the book they could think of and threw it in there for no other reason other than because they could. Reminds me of an old saying: Just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should do it... ;-)

While it results in some spectacular and intricate action sequences (I could frame-step through it all day), it also results in visual sensory overload and things can become confusing to follow. The impression I was left with was that they replaced valuable screen time that could have been used to tell a decent story with a lot of eye candy.

I watched the film specifically for its eye candy, so it's not a huge sticking point with me, but I don't think it's particularly good film making policy to sacrifice telling a good story (ultimately, what a film is supposed to do) for fluff.

I didn't hate FF:AC by any stretch but I wouldn't exactly heartily recommend it to non-fans either. However, I would recommend that anyone into CG/animation should consider adding it to their collection--- or at least watch it once.

-n