Blu-ray Review: Appleseed: Ex Machina
By
Jon Liu
Video Format: 1.85:1 1080p
Audio Formats: English, Japanese Dolby Digital English 5.1, French, Cantonese, Dutch, German Stereo
Starring: Kara Greenberg, Luci Christian, Allison Sumrall, David Matranga, Hilary Haag, Illich Guardiola
Directed by: Shinji Aramaki
Release Date: March 11, 2008
General
Appleseed: Ex Machina is the sequel to the popular Japanese anime Appleseed movie. It takes place in the distant future where cyborg terrorists are coordinating attacks to ultimately bring the city-state of Olympus down. The officials send out elite peace keepers, ES.W.A.T, to preserve the peace and stop the terrorists attacks. Leading the elite enforcers are a human, a cyborg, and a bioroid (duplicated humans who lack the negative emotional traits of typical humans). These three, Deunan, Briarios, and Tereus are on a mission to find out who’s behind the cyborg attacks.
The style of the Appleseed movie is part three-dimensional computer animation and part cel-shaded animation, all of which was done through a computer. I found that this movie blended the two types of animation better than the original. Judging by the technological advancements in the last two decades since the first film, I’d say that had a hand in the improvement that I saw.
Tech Specs
Video: Truthfully, I expected nothing short of spectacular when I heard that this movie coming to Blu-ray. With a direct digital-to-digital transfer, generally one can expect no less. This transfer indeed was very impressive, but isn’t as eye-popping as some other animated/CG movies that have been released on Blu-ray. There’s nothing wrong with the transfer itself; it’s more the style of the film that makes it simply less eye catching as something like Cars. The colors are very vibrant and detail was very impressive, but the style of the film mars the clarity of the film a bit. Even though the clarity is slightly reduced, the film is able to keep a three-dimensional quality to it. Like I mentioned before, the transfer is impressive given that the same animation as one of the Pixar films is not to be expected.
Audio: The original Appleseed movie was a very bombastic, surround-laden movie and I was hopeful they would do the same for this movie. Thankfully Appleseed measured up! There are plenty of action sequences in this film and each time they ramp up, the surround activity follows suit. The dialog was easily heard and ambient noises for individual environments were properly issued. The only thing that this mix lacked was earth-shaking LFE. There is a good amount of weight, but there were instances where I thought there should be more impact from the LFE that just didn’t show up. This was also the case for the original Appleseed as well, and may just be true for most animes in general.
Extras
There’s a filmmaker’s commentary, and four separate featurettes presented in HD.
Menus/Navigation
The menus are simple and straightforward. Nothing too extraordinary here.
Overall Impressions
I think this was a nice follow-up to the original Appleseed movie, although I didn’t find the storyline as compelling. Fans of the first movie will still want to check this movie out. Like the audio and the video transfer in the first movie, they were equally impressive and are likely the reason for people to check this title out anyway. I really like the animation style of the Appleseed series so this was a no-brainer for me.
Linear Mode
