DVD Talk review of 'Appleseed Ex Machina' (Blu-ray)
 

I read John Sinnott's DVD review of Appleseed Ex Machina at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=32574 and...

He seemed to want a realistic animation style. This and the previous movie share the same cell shaded style.

Yeah, it seems like he didn't understand it was a stylistic choice and not one necessarily limited by technology.

I don't know about the Blu-Ray version, but I should point out that both reviewers who did the DVD release on this site were totally wrong about the Japanese track. It is in 5.1 as well. The back of the DVD case lists it wrong.

Specifically, like the first film IIRC it's all motion capture technology as well - these guys could have gone for Final Fantasy if they wanted to, but they went with the human movement design - Vexille uses the same tech too.

I wanna know if the person that write this review know anything about 3d animation or CGI films?
The thing you said about the skin is so absurd!
The look of the skin is called TOON SHADER, and it was created to resemble the look of traditional 2d manga, where you have hard edges between the colors of the skin, and also has a black stroke, that sorrounds the toon objects.
The first film has a LINEAR toon, that is called for a toon that has hard edges between the colors.. and EX machina has a SMOOTH version of the toon.. and let me tell you, it looks awesome.

The toon colors reacts to diferent light colors in the scene and it works just perfect, also when are explosions, you can see the toon lighting it up, so the shader is fully integrated with light in the scene and everything.

Thats one thing, another is the thing you are saying about the hair.. That style of hair is something you see in anime and manga, so what they try to do is use that style but in 3d, so the hair is modeled that way.. have you seen Final fantasy Advent Children?? the hair of the characters there is modeled the same way.. or you think there, that they dont know how to make hair look more real?? Come on you sould know a little if you want to write reviews about films like this one.

Another thing is the animation of the hair.. I dont think it is necesary to animate the hair of all the characters.. all the lead characters has the hair animated, dunan, briareos clone, atena, and some other characters, but you have sooo many extras in the scenes in the streets, that dont need that kind of simulation on the hair.

You have so many things going on in the movie, cloth dinamics, soft dinamics, rigid dinamincs, explosions.. have bullets bouncing on the flor... and a UNIQUE style in the characters look never seen before.. All the movie is a work of art.

Thats my opinion.

While Ex Machina looks better, I have a real problem with the change of voice actors. The cast of the first film was fine. They shouldn't have changed voice actors.

Did not like this film. The first was one was good, not a masterpiece, but still a visual tour-de-force with a fine story to boot in. As for this one, every single John Woo / Action film cliche is used over and over again, which makes it seem like director Shinji Aramaki just made this film to please producer John Woo and say "Look, its just like how you would've made it!"

Oh but the visuals are great. Loved that though.

The extras on the other hand, terrible. They are in a large part, aimed at a 'western' audience who have never heard about anime before. Where are the in-depth making-of materials? or even input from Woo? nada.....

I know some people loved this film though. I just wish it wasn't so cliched.