NOTE:
Please keep in mind that this review is old, so while some editting
has been done to make it read a little more timelessly, a lot of it
is obviously dated. As such, where some things may be noted as
'spoilers', they probably no longer are.
After
letting it sit on the DVR for what seems like a year now, I've
finally started to dig into my old Ani-Monday recorded events. To
kick things off, I started from the bottom of the list with the CG
film, 'Negadon: The Monster from Mars'.
Be
warned - there are MASSIVE spoilers ahead, due to the films short
running time.
Negadon
takes place in the distant future, telling the story of Ryuichi
Narasaki, a former high-robotics inventor, who is begged by a former
student to return for a military contract. Narasaki refuses, vowing
to never again work with robotics, after an accident caused the death
of his daughter Emi years before. Meanwhile, a terraforming ship (a
ship to make something more Earth-like and hospitable) comes back
from Mars, with a large rock for study. Something goes wrong on the
flight back however, and the ship crash-lands, releasing a huge
monster, the title's namesake Negadon. Seeing the creature's
destruction, Nagasaki takes it on himself to put an end to it, to
save the future generations.
As
I said before, this is a really short film. It totals in at about 25
minutes at most, as it aired in place of an episode of a series on
Syfy's Ani-Monday block. That said, there's not a whole lot more if
it had been full-length, or at least an hour long. For what it is
though, Negadon was enjoyable enough. During it's production, a lot
of attention was clearly paid to making it feel like an old-school
kaiju ("gaint monster") film, like Godzilla or GAmera.
Despite it being in the future, the technology (barring one giant
robot) is old-school, with tanks and fighter jets right out of a 60s
to 70s monster film. To extend the effect even further, fake 'film
damage' such as rips and tears, and sun spots, were added on top of
the CG animation, to make it look as if the film were much older than
it was.
Even
with all of that added though, you can tell how good the CG is. It's
not quite FFVII: Advent Children caliber perhaps, but it's pretty
close, at least Imagi quality.
The
main drawback of this film is just what I said before - it's just too
short to make you really care about the characters, all two of them,
three if you count Negadon and four if you count the dead daughter.
Had this been a longer film, or an actual episode for a series, it
would have been much more satisfactory.
Hey,
there we go. That's what we need, a nice kaiju series rather than a
movie...but that's a thought for another time. This movie was good
enough to keep me watching until it's end, but when it's only one
program of 30 minutes total, that's not saying much.
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