BLUE REMAINS (2000)

Blue Remains is another CG animated film. I’ve been seeing a lot of anime recently and although I will never get sick of the genre, I was a little worried that it would be another disappointing effort where I was going to spend as much time looking at the clock as I would the film. This wasn’t quite the case, but I have to say that the 77 minutes that this picture lasted did feel a little longer.

The film is set almost exclusively underwater; the reason for this is that at some point in the future one set of superpowers said something unflattering about the mums of another set of superpowers and fisticuffs started. There was some shouting and screaming and pulling of hair but then someone went that little too far and launched a nuke. One nuke led to another and soon everyone was doing it. The result was that the surface of the Earth was irradiated and only life below the surface of the waves had any chance of surviving.
Fast forward 90 years and we find ourselves onboard a spaceship that plunged into the depths of the ocean just as the nuclear war was happening. This spaceship had a cargo of 3 people, a big computer and a handful of seeds. They were returning to Earth to plant said seeds in order to regenerate the life on this already barren planet. However, because of the war, they ditched into the sea to be safe. The crew comprised of a 14 year old girl (Amamiku), her pet robot and her parents who, when they realised what was going on, put their daughter into suspended animation (they were already irradiated and so didn’t join her). So, as I said, 90 years have passed, the girl has woken up and now she is trying to complete her parents work by planting the seeds. However, this is not as easy as she would have hoped because she is not the only sentient being on the planet. The Glyptofane is a creature that believes that, as human life destroyed the planet, any attempt by another human to kick start the ecosystem will ultimately lead to humans destroying it all over again. It sees this as a bad thing and decides that eradicating the human disease is the best course of action. Amamiku is not alone though in her struggle to reseed the Earth. She has the help of a handful of other humans (that swim around in a cool multi-winged submarine) that work for 3 other creatures like Glyptofane but think that Amamiku should be helped and not hindered.

So there, in a nutshell, is the story. But it wasn’t anything especially new or groundbreaking. I couldn’t help thinking that I had seen this all before, maybe in a different setting, maybe not quite as soggy, but still I had this niggle in the back of my mind that this wasn’t an original idea (Fist of the North Star? For those of you that have seen it).So what about the graphics? Oh dear. OK, that’s a little cruel, let me be more specific. I loved Glyptofanes buddies, they were basically human central nervous systems (brain and eyes included) just floating in stationary columns of water. Glypto himself was a Frankensteined version, having lost everything below the brain stem but gaining some natty little sparkplugs. This meant he was free to move about and, say for example, go for a picnic or pilot his own mechanical giant squid – which leads me on to the vehicles. The Bad guy stuff was great, I love the squid thing I just mentioned, but more than that I thought that the 8-pointy-legged bashy thing (you’ll know it when you see it) was fantastic. Pretty much all of the vehicles in the film were memorable.
The people on the other hand were a completely different kettle of fish (keeping with the watery theme). I just wish that the humans had been rendered with as much flair and imagination as Glypto and his mates, but they were very basic and quite disappointing. They looked a bit like the CG equivalent of Thunderbird puppets (although Stingray would be more appropriate).

The film is originally Japanese, and I hope that there was a problem with the translation, because the script also fell short of the mark. Maybe in the original tongue the dialogue is fluid and dynamic, but in English it is staccato and confusing. I’d like to think that if someone who could understand the original language had watched and reviewed this instead of me, it may have scored better, but until I can understand the language, I’m afraid that I’ll have to mark it as I saw it.

The DVD extras contain an interview with the director (fortunately with English subtitles) and a trailer for the other Artsmagic film I reviewed for TFA – Alice. There are also Bios and filmographies, all in all quite a good collection of features.

Score