I watched the anime film Vexille. It’s completely 3-D animation, including the characters. I don’t mind it, having gotten used to it with the earlier Appleseed films that this resembles. MC Vexille is cut from the same cloth as Deunan from Appleseed, right down to her hair. The story involves her military company SWORD infiltrating a future Japan that has closed itself from the world, ala Edo period Japan, in order to further its ambitions to develop banned bio-robotics. It’s a pretty grim vision of Japan’s future with the remaining populace herded into greater Tokyo and the rest of the country completely obliterated as the Wasteland. The mecha design is one of the highlights of these films. There’s even a touch of Tachikoma about some of the smaller fighting machines we encounter, with their funny little chatter and shouts. The back story has the people of Japan subjecting themselves to innoculations against disease that are actually a chemical that turns them slowly into robots, if you can believe it! This was 2004, way before Covid, but the sort of detail that’s gonna fire the conspiracy theorists. I can’t say I love the pro-military and uber-Capitalist elements of the story, but there’s some exciting action scenes. The giant metal worms that inhabit the Wasteland are straight out of Dune.
I watched the first story in the TO anime film I picked up from Dixons last week. It was called Elliptical Orbit and it was very good. Directed by Sori, who directed Vexille, it’s another 3-D animation set on an orbiting space station that doubles as a ‘gun’ that fires supplies to the Moon. It’s visited by an interstellar ship called the Flying Dutchman that has just returned from a 15 year journey to Alpha Centauri with a payload of precious liquid protons. But space pirates take over the station and try to steal the payload. That’s the basic story, but it’s the character details that really resonated. Maria is the Captain of the Flying Dutchman and, because she spent much of the journey in a hibernation pod, has only aged a couple of years. The scene where she meets her ex-lover, who stayed behind, is stunning. He’s aged 15 years, has married and his wife has died in the interim. Maria also left behind her son by him, and he also has died. It’s heavy time-shifting stuff. Then we find out that during the voyage she was having sex with the three male crewman in turn. Good gritty detail. I’m still not sure if I liked the bandanna she wears though.