2001 Nights (Fumihiko Soris To)

Just adding this review to counter balance the bad mouthing of initial reviews. I don't know where or what you have seen but CGI in this movie is excellent and crisp - proper blu ray quality. The stories are good, I liked especially the first one. The animation is on a very high level. Rating this a 1 out of 5 is very misleading. It may not be the top class, but it definitely deserves a positive rating!

This is a title I expected a lot from - adapted from a well received Manga and directed by Fumihiko Sori who was involved with acclaimed Anime films such as Appleseed, I was hoping for a thought provoking and immersive Science-Fiction story. Unfortunately though it didn't quite deliver.

This is a condensed version of the manga, rather than containing all 19 of the original stories it picks out 2, each lasting around 45 minutes. The first story looks at a strained reunion between Dan and Maria, they are old flames who have become distanced by age. Maria has been biologically 'frozen' as she travels, the result is that she is remains quite young whereas Dan has aged. This was an opportunity for an exploration into the effects their differences have had on how they feel about each other, set to a backdrop of a terrorist attack there is even more scope for an involved story - but it never happens. It feels like lazy story-telling, it never really delves below the action of what you see other than some cursory on-screen tension. The second story has more success but is still far from great sci-fi. Set some years beyond the first, spores on a newly discovered planet are found to have unexpected qualities and again, there is a difficult romance which is occasionally quite moving.

As this is set in space you expect space-craft and thankfully that is one area where 2001 Nights excels itself - they look spectacular and as they turn or the viewpoint sweeps across, the 3D animation renders the physics of the movement well and they look almost photorealistic. The actual 'human' animation is shaded 2D animation and although it initially looks a bit clumsy or superimposed, your eye gets used to it and it begins to look more natural. The quality of the 2D animation isn't as impressive however, block colour with only a small amount of additional detail looks unfinished and the their movements are jerky and not lifelike, if you happen to watch the dub (which I tend not to) then the speech looks even more odd. Mouth movements and eyes look soul-less and more like something from a console game than what you expect from big-name animation. Ah well, at least the Blu-Ray transfer is one of the best I've seen for a while! Though the human characters lack any life, the backdrops and vehicles are crammed full of detail and realistic textures. In high-definition they look awesome and panning shots of spacecraft almost makes this worth watching for the visuals alone. The American dub is okay too, though I'd always recommend the native audio track - and thankfully the subtitles seem genuine and not 'dubtitles'. Special features are in Standard Definition but the interviews are interesting and the trailers make the main feature look better than it is.

In a nutshell: Some great concepts are let down by bad characterisations and underwhelming sub-plots. Although I found this to be below average there is still enough here to make sure I check out any similar future releases. I never felt emotionally engaged with any of the characters and ultimately that's why this didn't work for me, I tend to mention Voices of a Distant Star a lot - but that film shows how short features can achieve great depth and feel much more accomplished than this.

The original manga 2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino, published in English translation by Viz in 1990, was a collection of science-fiction stories based around the expansion of humanity into space following a technological Great Advance. Although each of the stories were standalone, collectively they considered the necessity of humanity leaving behind old beliefs and attitudes in order to flourish in a new environment, face the possibility of extraterrestrial life, colonise new worlds and face other unknown challenges. It takes a while for humanity to adapt, but the insights gained, the ideas explored and the discoveries made through the stories managed to be intelligent as well as thrilling space adventures.

Adapting only two of the dozen or so stories, 'Elliptical Orbit' and 'Symbiotic Planet', Fumihiko Sori nonetheless manages to faithfully capture the flavour of Yukinobu Hoshino's original series in 'To'. The two stories don't perhaps give a sense of some of the more ambitious themes of the stories relating to religion, antimatter and the seeding of planets, but as an introduction, the two stories adapted here have a good balance between ideas and SF action. Originally drawn in a much more realistic style than the typical manga series, it's appropriate also that Sori brings the 3D CG and motion capture techniques used in Appleseed and Vexille to 'To', the detail of the vast spaceships, the creation of planetary landscapes and the fluid movement of animation all working perfectly with the deep space settings.

Clearly however, the CG animation techniques are not to everyone's taste, particularly when applied to human figures and movements, but this is still animation, and it doesn't need to look perfectly 'real' (no one complains about unrealistic body movements in traditional cel animation). Saying that, the sense of movement and facial expressions are actually very well done here and completely involving, particularly in the Japanese language version (the English dub is good, but doesn't match words or expressions quite as well). It also looks phenomenal in High Definition on the Blu-ray disc, with tremendous detail and smooth movements. The UK Blu-ray release from Manga Entertainment also includes two long interviews with the director and the Japanese voice actors, as well as all the usual promos and trailers.