Flutterby™! : Final Fantasy

Went with Leo, Phil, and Charlene to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (warning, very annoying Flash site) last night. A technological marvel. All those places where I wondered if they were avoiding showing too much because the animation or some other feature sucked? Not a problem. Too bad they didn't have a script. It's probably watchable if you're an animé fan, but the dialogue is painful at best, even if there does seem to be a story somewhere underneath all that begging to get out. At Scotch Night Larry Gritz commented that he thought the animation was fine but the skin shading was weak. Perhaps I've been looking at too many fashion magazines recently, but I thought the skin was fine. The face animation was a little wooden, the hair was perfectly reasonable, the clothing was very well done. So it's probably a must-see if you're an animation or Japanese movie fan, otherwise skip it, there'll be something along soon with equivalent technology that doesn't have painful dialog and gratuitous video-game sequences (although based on the Monsters, Inc. trailer beforehand, that may not be coming from Pixar).