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Movie shakes up Tinsel Town by bringing real life to graphics

By Jon Herskovitz
REUTERS, SEATTLE
Friday, Jul 13, 2001, Page 19

This is not your kids' Pokemon. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a new movie that follows the mold of Pokemon as an animated feature based on a popular video game from a Japanese company.

But that is were the comparison ends. Final Fantasy the movie marks a breakthrough in computer graphic (CG) animation. There are no saucer-shaped eyes, sharp-angled noses and jerky motions, all typical of Japanese animation such as Pokemon.

Final Fantasy, which hits US movie theaters next week, has CG animation that approaches the Holy Grail of the industry called "photo-realism" in which digital "actors" look and behave exactly like humans.

More importantly, the movie marks a new chapter for the Japanese video game industry. With its release, Square Co Ltd has established itself as a powerful new kid on the block in Hollywood's animation industry and has given notice to its rivals in Japan that it can spin its popular video games into a new medium by turning them into feature-length movies.

Square built an animation production studio in Hawaii from scratch for US$45 million to make Final Fantasy. It brought over 80 animators from Japan and 120 from 21 other countries for the project that took four years to complete.

It was a pricey gamble, but Final Fantasy director and video game creative legend Hironobu Sakaguchi said the foray into CG movies was a logical business move. "The Hawaii studio puts us at the forefront in computer graphics," he said.

In terms of technology, Sakaguchi said, there are not that many differences between making a video game and making a movie: The computer software and its applications are basically the same.

"The difficult part is in the fact that there is a culture for movies that is so different from games," Sakaguchi said. "It is tough for Japanese game makers to make the jump to Hollywood. We have to look at a completely different culture in America and make something that will entertain American and international movies audiences."

Taking a global perspective in terms of developing products that will entertain audiences around he world and being a leader in CG technology are steps Japanese video game makers need to take in order to get ahead in the industry, he said.

The intense competition among Japanese video game makers has led to skyrocketing production costs. A sequel to the Final Fantasy video game series, which tallied global sales of over 31 million units, cost US$30 million to US$35 million to make.

Technological advances in video game consoles embodied in Sony Corp's dream machine PlayStation2 and Microsoft Corp.'s X-Box have pushed video game makers to new heights.

But in the business year that ended on March 31, most of Japan's top game makers were hit by an earnings decline and Square's chairman resigned this year after his company plunged into the red for the first time in its 15-year history.

"The Japanese game making industry is not in its healthiest state," said Final Fantasy director Jun Aida, adding that the Hawaii production facility was a gamble aimed at pushing Square to the technological forefront. Square aims to keep on making movies and has been in talks with Sony and its Hollywood studios to develop three more movies.

The cooperation deal makes sense, Aida explained, because Square works closely with Sony on its video game products and Sony's Hollywood studios do not have an animation arm like rivals Walt Disney Co's DreamWorks SKG and Fox Entertainment Group Inc.

Under the deal with Sony's Columbia Pictures for Final Fantasy, Square picked up production costs for the movie while Columbia will distribute the film in North America and pay marketing costs.

Sakaguchi said that when a Hollywood director makes a movie based on a video game, gamers can sense a difference in the big screen version because the creative views of the movie director are different from those of the game creator.

As the creator of video game Final Fantasy and the director of the film, Sakaguchi is hoping he can meet the expectations of the audiences he developed.

Many see the merger of the US$7.7 billion movie industry with the US$6.5 billion video game industry as a natural step.

For future movies, Sakaguchi said he would like to use the main characters in the Final Fantasy movie -- female lead Aki Ross and male hero Gray Edwards -- and put them in new settings and stories. "It would be great if we could develop a star who would be something like a digital Julia Roberts," he said.
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