' http://www.nixflix.com/reviews/appleseed.htm#STILLS
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' The film's visuals are absolutely stunning, having been rendered using a new process of 3-D cell shading and animation. Every frame of the film is beautiful, with some truly jaw-dropping images the likes of which I have never seen before. As opposed to live-action films that incorporate CGI effects, "Appleseed" is like one long, flawless vision of a credible future world. Characters are brought to life convincingly, looking and moving like real people. All of this is a far cry from "Final Fantasy", which spent all its time animating the hair of the female lead and forgot about the rest of her body. Since the characters are as well written as they are animated, the viewer actually cares about what happens, and from this "Appleseed" achieves what many live-action films do not.
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' Shinji Aramaki directs with a great sense of vigor, keeping the film moving at a great speed, perfectly balancing its intellectual and visceral sides. The action is often breathtaking, evolving the now-common tricks seen in films like "The Matrix" to awesome new levels. The first ten minutes of the film, where Deunan faces off against a platoon of robots, are amongst the most exciting I have ever seen. Aramaki fully exploits the power of the visuals, generating a real atmosphere of awe and wonder, helping to create a fascinating yet believable future society in Olympus.
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' http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401233/maindetails
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' Personally, I have to say Appleseed is one of the most groundbreaking animes in the last six or seven years. The visuals are stunning, the action is well paced, and most of the capabilities of this cell-shaded CGI animation are explored, delivering many moments that would be impossible in hand drawn. And I also liked much of the art style and how it called back to all the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk anime and manga of the late 80s/Early 90s. The environments and characters really seemed like living, breathing versions of the ones in Akira and Ghost in the Shell.
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' But the distracting and embarrassing clichЁ¦s in Appleseed seem to come from this new art style. With the cell-shaded CGI you are experiencing anime style characters existing in an environment much more like the real world then 2D hand-drawn anime. The characters are bound very close to real world physics in this form of animation. Their heads can't grow big when they yell, a single drop of sweat can't appear on the temple of their foreheads when they are embarrassed and a flashing colored background can't run behind them when they transform or become excited.
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' http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/525/525036p1.html
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' The film has a unique visual style that was created using a hybrid of CG-animation, traditional 2-D character animation and motion capture technology.
