Appleseed Posted November 30, 2005 at 6:12 pm

Having recently put a rental copy of Appleseed through the paces, I’ve come away pleasantly surprised by this visually impressive sci-fi film. The feature that sets Appleseed apart is its extensive use of cel-shaded animation. The movie boasts numerous mecha designs that benefit greatly from the effect. The cel-shaded look also works reasonably well with the simple, stylized facial features famous to anime, lending depth while adding some odd shadowing.

The use of cel-shading in Appleseed seems to be limited to the characters and interactive objects like Deunan’s gun. Some of the lighter static backgrounds, like the tree-lined avenues that we see as Hitomi drives Deunan through Olympus, don’t benefit and look positively dated by comparison. Thankfully, the film has an abundance of night-time cityscapes that look great against the cel-shaded characters.

Beyond appearances, Appleseed proved to be far more engaging than I had anticipated. There are some bland fight scenes early on, but the story does eventually kick in and I found enough well-executed twists to keep me interested right up to the end.