Vexille

Directed by Fumihiko Sori

Review by Roberto Azula

Fumihiko Sori’s Vexille is a mixed bag of delights and disappointments. Anime fans (such as myself) will enjoy immersing themselves in the visually stunning landscapes, the hard-edged cyberpunk storyline, and the rich, layered original score. Yet just as this film is about to soar, the writers unfortunately apply the brakes and grind Vexille into a series of woefully cliché scenes, undermining what could have been a veritable classic up there with Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

The premise is very compelling. Having become wholly self-sufficient with its ultra-high technology, Japan has entered an era of extreme isolation and has left the UN. The country has once again become a land of mystery, as in the days of the isolationist shoguns. Suspecting that Japan is engaging in illegal and dangerous robotics technology, the US government sends in SWORD, an elite paramilitary group, to infiltrate the country. Naturally, the government will disavow any knowledge of SWORD’s activities should any of the agents be captured. You can fill in the blanks from there; the story does not deviate from this tired action movie template. But what the agents do discover about the citizens of Japan is the film’s biggest surprise, and a fairly creepy storyline develops from there.

Vexille primarily relies on photo-realistic CGI style of animation, the kind you see in the cinematic sequences of computer games. (This method was used in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Polar Express). The results are rather mixed. When the film focuses upon landscapes, machinery, and action sequences, the flat matte appearance is both realistic and otherworldly. The animation of the individual characters, however, leaves much to be desired. As with most CGI cartoons, the characters’ movements appear arthritic and clumsy, and there is still no avoiding that “dead-eye” look that plague the characters’ facial expressions.

But the poor character design is not what finally sinks this ambitious feature. Sori never really explores the full potential that his trans-human premise hints at. Rather, he falls back on the worst aspects of hackneyed action films, including the mawkish inspirational speech, the predictable death of the spunky kid, and the big explosion in the end that solves all the plot’s problems. Though Vexille is gorgeous to look at, with a gritty, exciting first half, the film eventually self-destructs into a straight-to-video Steven Seagal feature. I’m certain Sori can do better than this, or least find a better writer to work with.