We were at the ‘World Sneak Preview’ of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed at the ICA tonight. Complimentary sake and sushi, a lovingly-prepared but very silly flipchart presentation from the producer about the politics of the world in which it is set, then the film. The technique is impressive — the city of Olympus is beautifully rendered, the battle set-pieces are fluidly choreographed and edited, the whole nicely balancing genre conventions and virtuoso hyper-realism. Although the first few minutes owe too much to The Matrix-meets-Avalon, and in parts (to my eye) the human characters suffer somewhat from traditional anime styling, Appleseed is something genuinely new in feature-length animation: detail everywhere, lovingly rendered, with sinuous tracking and editing.

Less successfully, the film contains way too much exposition (even without the flipchart!), in the style of some Russian epic from the 60s — I’ll be surprised if it makes it to American multiplexes without some trimming down. The music supervision also jarred: it was nice to see Basement Jaxx turning up for the premiere, but their music — and that of Oakenfold and the rest — on the soundtrack made no sense thematically or emotionally, and seemed to be just a hook for an international audience.

But if you can ignore the turgid moralising — which just slows down the action — the 3D animation and design (the mecha are great, while the Mobile Fortresses out-scale any city-stomping weapons platform I can remember) is stunning. All the big fast things were perfect. Go see it at a big cinema with decent Dolby when it’s on release next month, or get it on DVD (evidently scheduled for July) and turn up the sub-woofer.

My DVD of Decasia arrived today. I’m watching it tonight with the sound off (I haven’t bothered repatching since the Bryston went back). Very nice, although the print has quite a few transfer artifacts, which is a little ironic. I had forgotten that I still had my active subwoofer connected, which adds a certain something a few minutes after the nuns…

I first saw Rybczynski’s Tango, I Can’t Stop and some of Orchestra on the ABC’s Sunday Spectrum strand on TV back in the 80s in Tasmania (the original Sunday Spectrum doesn’t even rate a mention on the ABC website, but it was really important at the time. I seem to remember the work of Rybczynski, Michael Snow and Ed Emshwiller all being shown within the same month. Revelations.)

I’ve been hunting The Fourth Dimension since Tokyo. Tim saw it at (I may be wrong) Image Forum, and made it sound a thing worth tracking down. That was probably 13 years ago. The DVD set, including all the above and many more, arrived over the weekend.

So far, The Fourth Dimension is the treasure. It looks rendered, but given that it was made in 1988, I guess it’s most likely built using exquisite compositing, anamorphic lenses and motion control damped with several hundred tonnes of concrete. Unfortunately, the transfer suffers from streaky video artifacts and a washed-out palette, suggesting that the DVD was dubbed from laserdisk rather than digital or cine master. It’s also a shame the DVDs come with no notes other than a ‘making of’ for Orchestra. In fact, the whole package feels a bit thrown together. But given that these films seem to have been unavailable for years, it’s nice to have them in any form. Can’t help wondering if the ones originated in Hi-Vision will be rereleased in a more modern HD format sometime soon.

Zbig is quoted as having a systems approach to his film-making:

“l am only an observer”, Rybczynski explained, “I planned the operation and watch what would come out of it”.

All the films, to my eye, are much improved by watching them patiently, settling into the mood with the sound off, as ambient video art.

Yesterday, Tsai Ming-liang’s short The Skywalk is Gone and feature Goodbye Dragon Inn at the London Film Festival. I’ve seen his The Hole before, and wasn’t impressed, but these, yesterday, were something special.

There are plenty of reviews of them around, pointing out the influences of Tati, Antonioni and the rest. But to me, the spirit of both films was more in the vein of Chris Morris: the long, weird scene with the smoking man at the row of urinals, the sinuous, nut-crunching girl, and much else in the feature, and the dénouement (if you could call it that) of the short could easily have been lifted straight from (a rather more formalist) Jam. Although seeing this bleak, sylised humour in an Asian film, I’m left wondering how much Morris himself has been influenced by the dark Japanese ‘comedies’ of the early Eighties, with their complex setups of social disconnection which lead nowhere, their pratfalls of nothingness tripping clumsily over itself…