A brilliant film that helped define a genre

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

With having had a wonderful time last year watching Mamoru Hosoda's excellent Anima/Japanamtion film The Girl Who Leapt Through Time with a friend last year,I decided to go on a search around Amazon UK for a title which would hopefully have a similar style to Hosoda's movie.After having to get past dozens of pages filled with "related" titles that were nothing at all like what I was after,I was thrilled to find a movie at the very end of the final page,which matched exactly what I was looking for,which led to me getting ready to discover the spirits of the past.The plot:Conducting a Genetic experiment on a forest so that tresses can survive in a harsher location,the leading scientist experiments sadly has unexpected side effects,which lead to the plants gaining conciseness and destroying a vast amount of the human population and also breaking the planet's moon into a million pieces.300 years later:Being left in ruins by the devastation caused by the plants,the surviving humans spilt into 2 groups,with the first group being a militaristic one which based itself in a burnt out industrial city called Ragna,whilst the second,most largest group of survivors decide to live in a city that they call "Neutral City",which is designed to grasp as much of the water that the plants allow them to,and to also calm the tensions of the residents in Ragna enough so that they don't set out on an all out war against the forest.Playing around with a group of friends on Neutral City,Agito and Cain accidentally annoy the mysterious guardians of the forest called the Zruids,who decide to stop Agito and Cain from playing around any more,by pushing them into the little seen underbelly of the city.Attempting to get out of the underbelly,Agito finds an old machine,which after Agito spends some time messing with the buttons for a while,releases a girl called Toola,who appears to have been asleep for over 300 years.Escaping just before the forest unleashes a deadly flood,Agito and Cain soon begin to discover that the awakening of Toola may be about to cause the ingredients which lead to the near destruction of the human race 300 years ago to become awakened.View on the film:Opening with quick,fascinating glimpses to events that caused the near end of the world,the screenplay by Nana Shiina,Naoko Kakimoto,Umanosuke Lida and John Burgmeier does very well at making sure that the after effects from the event are never made overly complex or given needlessly dry exposition.The writer's instead smartly decide to show everything from the ground level,which makes the burnt out world that the characters find themselves stuck in,one that is very easy to get an identifiable grip on to.Whilst the screenplay does well at creating a sketch of the world with smooth brush strokes,the writer's sadly fail at building strong,cohesive plot threads for any of the character's,with the various residents of Neutral City and Ragna continuously changing views on if they should go to war with the forest,being one which is filled with character's switching from pro to anti that is not allowed any sense of depth or motive,which leads to the character's never truly becoming fully formed.Despite the screenplay featuring a number of flaws which sadly take the shine off the movie,director Keiichi Sugiyama gives Studio Gonzo's debut film a dazzling stylish eye,with Suigiyama covering the movie in a terrific dark atmosphere by expertly using light to create shadows,which along with giving the hand drawn animation an eye catching appearance,also allows Keiichi to subtly show the dark motives laying behind the character's eye's.Backed by a sharp original soundtrack and a smooth English dub,Keiich expertly uses a combination of traditional and CGI animation to give this post-apocalypse world a real dept of field vision,with Keiich making the fantastic hand drawn animation feel almost three dimensional ,thanks to Keiich using minimal CGI effects to show the revived destructive nature that is slowly growing,which could destroy the spirit of the survivors forever.

The film had an intriguing idea and story-line. But unfortunately they have produced a lack luster effort. With a quite unfocused story and slowly paced.The story is set 300 years in the future, in a i would say post - apocalyptic landscape. A young boy/man Agito comes upon a girl frozen in time Tula wakes her up, which could tip the balance in an ongoing war between two factions. One whom wants to live peacefully with the forest and one that wants to bring the earth back, to the way it was. just by typing up the synopsis here, again gives me the feeling of a good idea gone to waist. One of the main things that bothered me were the way the two factions were put across, as the people who want to destroy the forest are obviously the bad guys, which is the obvious environmental message the film wants to put across and showed no subtlety while it slapped you across the face with this message, but the forest which has some mythical druids protecting it, come across to me as quite like a dictatorship holding the power over human kind. The pacing of the film was very slow with some action scenes you would hope lift the momentum for the picture which actually turned out quite bland and predictable.The film is beautifully drawn with the huge landscapes being absolutely stunning and competing with Studio Ghibli on that front. The dubbing was pretty good and the musical score was not disappointing.Overall an OK film, with decent elements, and an idea there that could work very well but not quite on this movie.

I enjoyed the idea behind Origin, which is a lot like Avatar and many of Hayao Miyazai's films, it talks about how greed and technology and the misuse of our resources will be our down fall, which is something I rather enjoy especially as seeing as how every year that passes we loose more and more open grounds and forests. Its sad how forests that used to cover most of our nation is now populated, by cities and greedy people that have no problem with wiping out populations and creatures that have lived there for long before people existed.I'm a little confused as to the role of the druids and their role in this story, which wasn't really explained. Also the practicality of an entire volcano being a hidden base seems rather absurd, the amount of energy it would take to move the mountain would be monumental and seems nearly impossible to store for how many centuries or years and expect all that equipment to not be effect is rather absurd.Unfortunately this is an idea that's been done over and over again, and it gets a little annoying about how the story ideas are all close to the same without any original ideas to add to it. I also was not a big fan of this style of art, but over all it was a good film.

I came across this animé on Netflix, and thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a watch. When the movie begins, large dragons that seem to be made of leaves strike from the moon and attack the earth, shattering the moon to pieces and leaving earth devastated. We then join the main action, some centuries later, and man lives in the ruins of the old world. The main character, a young boy named Agito, is swept away to an underground chamber while scavenging for water. A large, complex machine lies inside, containing a young girl woken from stasis, named Tula.If you're unfamiliar with animé, this plot sounds nice and simple, but if you are, then you know you've seen this before. The plot of a boy from one place, either a different world or the distant future, finds a mysterious girl from another place, and she turns out to play an important part in the world's destiny. It's been seen in Hayao Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky", Osamu Tezuka's "Metropolis", Mayumi Azuma's "Elemental Gelade" and others. Often, the boy's world is a more ragtag, harsh world, and the world the girl comes from is usually considerably more advanced.The setting we find ourselves in is subject also to the cliché of nature and technology out of balance and at war ("Princess Mononoke", "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind", "Blue Gender"), and our main cast lives in a place called Neutral City, between The Forest, populated by superintelligent plants, and Ragna City, basically a giant military base. The plants in the Forest can bond with humans, giving them great strength and wisdom (and white hair, which makes them easy to identify), but if they overuse the Forest's power, it consumes them. This happened to Agito's dad, who when we see him, is covered in vines. There are other supporting characters, including Yolda, the silver-haired matriarch of the city, Minka, the crazy redhead that likes Agito, and so on. Most of these characters don't do much, but they're fun additions to the story.This film plays with the conventions of this genre, though. For instance, "the girl" in this sort of story is usually very wise, stoic, powerful, special, meek and vulnerable, and is the key to everything. Tula has most of these qualities, but a key few are missing: she's not all that wise or stoic: in fact, she's incredibly normal and can be kind of a bitch sometimes. She feels threatened and confused by this world she's woken up in, and in a twist uncommon to this genre, goes to the villain's side willingly, as soon as the second act starts. The leader of Ragna City also has silver hair, and is from the past, like her. Her father developed a weapon that could take out the forest and allow the earth to "return to normal", which to us sounds like a perfectly obvious bad idea, but Tula, in a uniquely naïve way, wants things as they were.In another twist, Agito wants to save Tula from the military city. To do this, he goes into the Forest and asks for its power, like his father did. The leader of the forest are two small girls, who speak without moving their mouths and dart in and out from behind trees, speaking with a childlike sense of urgency. It was disappointing that we didn't see more or find out more about them, because they were a unique addition, but they give Agito the power of the Forest, which turns his hair from red to white.Spontaneously, he develops extraordinary powers, including superhuman agility, incredible strength, and so on. His action scenes as he flies around and punches trains in half (which, hilariously, start as SOON as the Forest gives him the powers, not even giving him time to find out what happened) are amazing to watch, but it makes his character takes an unfortunate turn, and I'm not even entirely sure why. The hero of this genre is usually incredibly courageous (usually without superpowers), but when Agito gets the power of the Forest, it turns him from the likable, playful scamp at the beginning to a dead-serious zen master, still perfectly likable, but the change was so jarring. He bounces back a tiny bit at the end, but I never quite got the impression that he became "fun" again.This all sounds well and good for him, as now he can get shot in the chest by a tank and not feel a thing, but he must remember what happened to his father: he let the Forest overcome him. If he's not careful, he will lose his human form. Some of the transformations he undergoes look uncannily like the end of "Akira", and the power gradually consuming him resembles Ashitaka's cursed arm from "Princess Mononoke". These similarities are mainly visual, though, and don't come off as a knockoff. Agito's power is a dangerous balancing act, however, as he must use all the power he can to save Tula from the clutches of the military, and stop her from activating their superweapon. The villain has the same power he does, though, which could have been a more interesting conflict than what we got. Interestingly, he's not as unscrupulous as the villain often is in stories like this, which is novel.Tula grows as a character from her somewhat bland and timid beginnings, especially near the end when things really start going nuts, and her character development is probably the most satisfying of the movie.This movie doesn't have the emotional depth of other movies of this genre, like Castle in the Sky and certainly Metropolis. It is, however, visually spectacular, has some unique things about its story, and though a lot of it is things animé fans will find familiar, it still offers new and incredible sights and sounds that make it well worth seeing.