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Released by: Artsmagic
Released on: 7/27/2004
Director: Keitarou Motonaga
Cast: Yukei Yamada
Year: 20000
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The Movie:
Sometime in the bizarro-world of the future lives a pleasure droid named Malice. She's cruising around looking for 'johns', which is her job, despite the fact that events prior have more or less whipped out all of her potential clientele. Every once in a while, in order to keep functioning, Malice has to make a trip to 'The Repairer' to get overhauled and taken care of. It's the droid equivalent of getting a check up at the doctors office.
When she visits 'The Repairer' as is the norm for her, she instead finds a freaky tentacled critter that violates her in unseemly ways and leaves her there without so much as a thank you. When she wakes up and begins to recover from her ordeal, she discovers that she's starting to become human, not only physically, but emotionally as well. She begins to hate her job and look at herself in a completely different way and becomes aware of the fact that her recent transformation is going to cause the world she knows to reject her. Her kind no longer belongs in this world. She learns though that by kissing the machines that populate the world, she can transform them as well. So she sets out transforming a few at a time, but the results aren't quite what she'd hoped they'd be.
The dominant use of CGI animation as opposed to traditional animation (though there are bits and pieces of that thrown into the mix in a few scenes if you look for it) gives this film a truly otherworldly look. Malice lives in a cold world, and for once, CGI really works nicely in bringing that to life - it suits it perfectly. The mechanical characters almost look like puppets on a string with the way that they move and behave and react. Again, the animation style suits this quite well. I almost always prefer traditional animation over computer generated work but this time I have to admit that I don't think that the film would have worked as well if it hadn't used this style.
Aside from the visuals, the film plays around with some interesting themes of sexuality and growth and how the two can and do intertwine. As we all know, sometimes the changes we encounter as we develop wreak havoc with our heads. Puberty makes us crazy, so to speak. In a sense, as these robots (many of them already sexually aware by nature of their programming) develop, they're experiencing similar growing pains, albeit with very different results than acne, moodiness or body hair.
Overall, it makes for interesting viewing. I'm a casual anime fan at the best of times but seeing what is essentially a science fiction story (there are obvious elements of Blade Runner here) brought to life via computer animation seems like an obvious choice, doesn't it? Malice@Doll proves it can work when done right.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The film is presented in a solid if not perfect 1.33.1 fullframe presentation. There are a few scenes where some compression artifacts are noticeable and where the image looks just a bit fuzzy. There are also a couple of scenes where, when the characters move on screen, Luckily, that doesn't happen for the entire duration of the film. Most of the time the movie looks pretty good. Colors are nice and there's a reasonably high level of detail present from start to finish. Aside from the noted problems, this is a decent transfer.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack is available in either its native Japanese language or in a dubbed English version. The Japanese track is the obvious choice unless for some reason you're subtitle impaired. The English dubbing is better than average but still clumsy in a few spots. The quality of both tracks is fine, nice and clear without any hiss or distortion problems worth noting. There are some nice moments where the soundtrack kicks in quite forcefully and it really adds to the mood, and overall, this is a solid effort.
The biggest of the extra features on this release is an interview with voice actress Yukei Yamada, director Keitarou Motonaga, and writer Chiaki Konaka. They cover quite a bit of ground, mostly relating to pre-production and animation problems that arose and how they overcame them. They discuss their artistic influences and what their goals were with making this film.
A half-hour feature entitled Final Fantasies is an interesting segment with Jonathon Clements (the man who wrote the Anime Encyclopedia) in which he explains the differences between computer based animation and traditional Japanese anime techniques. He goes into quite a bit of detail on the history of the art form and how CGI has developed so rapidly in the industry in Japan.
Rounding out the features are trailers for Alice and Blue Remains, some character model artwork, and cast and crew talent biographies in text format on the disc.
The Final Word:
Malice@Doll is an interesting piece of computer animation with a uniquely Japanese slant. Artmagic has done a nice job on the package and supplied some interesting extras.