Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

In 2001, the world witnessed the birth of Aki Ross, the first computer-generated character designed to be indistinguishable from a real human being. This was not merely a technical achievement but a gamble that would define the future of animation. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy video game franchise, envisioned a film that would transcend the limitations of traditional animation. He aimed to create a character so lifelike that audiences would forget they were watching a digital creation. The film, titled Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, was a co-production between Japan and the United States, marking a significant moment in the history of cinema. It was the first photorealistic computer-animated feature film, and its production cost of $137 million made it the most expensive video game-inspired film until the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2010. The film's ambition was to push the boundaries of what was possible with computer graphics, using some of the most advanced processing capabilities available at the time. A render farm of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames, a monumental task that required a staff of 200 people working for four years. The film's success or failure would determine the future of Square Pictures, the studio behind the project, and the direction of animated films for decades to come.

A World Divided by Phantoms

The story of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within unfolds in 2065, a time when Earth has been ravaged by alien life forms known as Phantoms. These creatures, by physical contact, consume the Gaia spirit of living beings, killing them instantly, although minor contact may only result in an infection. The surviving humans live in barrier cities protected by energy shields that prevent Phantoms from entering, and are engaged in an ongoing struggle to free the planet. The narrative follows scientist Dr. Aki Ross and her mentor, Dr. Sid, who discover a means of defeating the Phantoms by gathering eight spirits: unique energy patterns contained by various lifeforms. When joined, the resulting energy wave can negate the Phantoms. Aki searches for the sixth spirit in the ruins of New York City when she is cornered by Phantoms but rescued by Captain Gray Edwards and his squad Deep Eyes. It is revealed that Gray was once romantically involved with Aki. The film's plot is a complex tapestry of science fiction and emotional drama, exploring themes of life, death, and the spirit. The Phantoms are not merely villains but are revealed to be the spirits of dead aliens brought to Earth on a fragment of their destroyed planet. This revelation adds a layer of tragedy to the conflict, as the Phantoms are not evil but lost souls seeking peace. The film's climax sees Aki and Gray combining the eight spirits to defeat the Phantoms, restoring the Earth's Gaia and allowing the Phantoms to ascend into space, finally at peace. The story is a testament to the power of hope and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds.

Who directed Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi. The film was co-directed by Motonori Sakakibara, with Jun Aida and Chris Lee serving as producers.

When was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within released?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within debuted on the 2nd of July 2001 at the Mann Bruins Theater in Los Angeles, California. It was released in the United States on the 11th of July 2001, and the DVD version was released on the 23rd of October 2001.

How much did Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within cost to produce?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within had a final production cost of $137 million. This amount included approximately $30 million spent on marketing by Columbia Pictures and escalated from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million.

What is the plot of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within unfolds in 2065 when Earth is ravaged by alien life forms known as Phantoms. The story follows scientist Dr. Aki Ross and Captain Gray Edwards as they gather eight spirits to defeat the Phantoms and restore the Earth's Gaia.

Who composed the soundtrack for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within?

Elliot Goldenthal composed the entire score for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The soundtrack was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with Belgian composer Dirk Brossé conducting.

Why did Square Pictures close?

Square Pictures closed in late January 2002 largely due to the commercial failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The film's box office losses and the merger delay between Square and Enix contributed to the studio's shutdown.

The Making of a Digital Masterpiece

The production of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a monumental undertaking that required the collaboration of hundreds of artists and technicians. The film was filmed entirely in English, and the original script, written by Sakaguchi, was titled Gaia. The screenplay was later rewritten by Al Reinert and Jeff Vintar. The film was co-directed by Motonori Sakakibara, with Jun Aida and Chris Lee both serving as producers. Lee even compared The Spirits Within, the first full-length photorealistic animated film, to Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cel animated film. In order to keep the film in line with Hironobu Sakaguchi's vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production. By April 2000, Square was partnering with Columbia Pictures to produce the film, making it the first animated feature Columbia had worked on since Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation in 1986. Columbia was given the rights to distribute the film worldwide, with the exception of Asia. The film was completed over a period of four years, during which approximately 200 people put in a combined 120 years of work on it. The first 18 months of development were spent creating the in-house software SQFlesh, which plugged into the programs Autodesk Maya and RenderMan. The majority of the rest of production was spent on animation. Square accumulated four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations for the film's production. The basic film was rendered at a custom render farm created by Square in Hawaii. It housed 960 Pentium III-933 MHz workstations. Character movements were filmed using motion capture technology. Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes, in others animators still had to add movements manually. Hand and facial movements were all done manually. Some of General Hein's facial features and poses were based on Hackett. As animators did not want to use any actual photographs in the film, all backgrounds were done using matte paintings. 1,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 141,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 90 minutes to render. By the end of production Square had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film.

The Voice of a New Heroine

Aki Ross's voice actor, Ming-Na Wen, was selected for a perceived fit between her personality and Aki's. Ming-Na, who found the role via her publicist, said she felt like she had given birth with her voice to the character. She gradually accustomed herself to the difficulty of working without the presence and spontaneity of real actors, and commented that the voice-acting work did not take much time, as she would just go into the studio once or twice a month for about four months with no need for make-up and costuming sessions. The workload was so light it did not interfere with her acting commitments in the television series ER. Sakaguchi said that he was pleased with the film's final cut, and he would not have changed anything if given a chance. The film had high cost overruns towards the end of filming. New funds had to be sourced to cover the increasing production costs while maintaining staff salaries. The film's final cost of $137 million, which included about $30 million spent on marketing by Columbia Pictures, escalated from an original budget rumored to be around $70 million. $45 million alone was spent on the construction of Square's studio in Hawaii. The character design of Aki Ross was a meticulous process, with each character's base body model built from more than 100,000 polygons, plus more than 300,000 for clothing alone. Aki's character model bears 60,000 hairs, each of which were separately and fully animated and rendered. In creating the characters, designers had to transition between using PowerAnimator, Autodesk Maya and RenderMan. Aki's appearance was conceived by the lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Sakaguchi to consider, and then used the selected design as a guide for her character model. Sato perceived Aki's original look as a supermodel, and subsequently removed her make-up and shortened her hair in order to give her a more intelligent look that would convince people that she's a scientist. In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make her appear as realistic as possible, making her similar to himself in as many ways as he could in the animation, including elements of his personality through facial expressions. He concluded that Aki ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that she's a lot cuter. The model for Aki was designed to closely follow human appearance, with Sakaguchi commenting in an interview: I think it's OK to look at Aki and be convinced that she's a human.

The Sound of a New Era

The soundtrack to the film was released on the 3rd of July 2001, by Sony Music. Elliot Goldenthal composed the entire score, as well as the film's theme song, The Dream Within, which had lyrics written by Richard Rudolf and vocals performed by Lara Fabian. Director Hironobu Sakaguchi opted for the acclaimed Goldenthal instead of Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of the Final Fantasy games' soundtracks, a decision met with mixed opinions as the former was completely unknown to many of the games' fans. The last song on the album and the second and final song to play during the film's credits (after The Dream Within) is Spirit Dreams Inside by Japanese rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel. The film's score was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with Belgian composer Dirk Brossé conducting. It was recorded in the United Kingdom at the Watford Coloseum and the London AIR Lyndhurst Hall and was mixed at the Manhattan Center Studios in the United States. In the liner notes to the album, Goldenthal describes the soundtrack as combining orchestration techniques associated with the late 20th-century Polish avant-garde, as well as his experiments from Alien 3, and 19th-century Straussian brass and string instrumentation. In the film's Making of featurette, Goldenthal states he used ghostly choral music when the Phantoms are emerging, in an attempt to give a celestial feeling, and focused on low brass clusters and taiko drum rhythms for violent scenes. When Aki talks about a dying girl, Goldenthal used a piano in order to give a domestic home-like feeling to a completely foreign environment, also choosing to use a flute each time Aki focusses on Gaia, as he believed it to be the most human kind of instrument. The album was met with positive reviews. Neil Shurley from AllMusic, who gave the album 4 out of 5, opined the album would probably have been nominated for an Oscar if the film itself had been more popular, as did the reviewer from Soundtrack Express, who gave the soundtrack 5 out of 5. Christopher Coleman from Tracksounds gave the soundtrack 10 out of 10, saying the feel of the album was expansive and majestic and that the score elevated the viewing experience of the film. A review from Filmtracks gave the album 4 out of 5, calling it an easy album to recommend. Dan Goldwasser from Soundtrack.net also gave the soundtrack 4 out of 5, calling it a must have. The album peaked at No. 19 on Billboards Top Soundtracks list and No. 193 on the Billboard 200 on the 28th of July 2001. The track The Dream Within was nominated for Best Original Song Written for a Film at the 2002 World Soundtrack Awards, but lost to If I Didn't Have You which was composed for Monsters, Inc.

A Box Office Tragedy

Before the film's release, there was already skepticism of its potential to be financially successful. Chris Taylor from Time magazine noted that video game adaptations had a poor track record at the box office and that Sakaguchi's first feature film. The film debuted on the 2nd of July 2001, at the Mann Bruins Theater in Los Angeles, California, and was released in the United States on July 11, where it made $11.4 million during its opening weekend, ranking in fourth place behind Legally Blonde, The Score and Cats & Dogs. The film would end up making $32 million in North America and selling 5,961,378 tickets in the United States. The film grossed $85 million in worldwide box office receipts, including in Japan. 1,456,523 tickets were sold in France, 4,299,604 tickets in other European countries and 446,728 tickets in Brazil. The film achieved average to poor results at the box office in most of Southeast Asia; however, it performed well in Australia, New Zealand and South Korea; 160,100 tickets were sold in Seoul City. In 2006, Boston.com regarded it as the 4th biggest box office bomb, estimating the film's losses at the end of its cinema run at over $94 million. In March 2012, CNBC considered it to be the 9th biggest box office bomb. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within holds an approval rating of 44% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 144 reviews, with an average rating of 5.30/10. The website's critical consensus reads: The movie raises the bar for computer-animated movies, but the story is dull and emotionally removed. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gives the film a score of 49 out of 100 based on 28 critics, indicating mixed or average reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore on opening night gave the film an average grade of C+ on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was a strong advocate of the film; he gave it 3½ stars out of four, praising it as a technical milestone. While having some minor criticism of the plot, he concluded the reason to see the film was simply, gloriously, to look at it, especially praising the realism in Aki's face. He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing others made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian echoed concerns about the plot, describing it as adequate though also stating that it quickly slipped into cliché. He also had high praise for the animation in general, though lamented that the character's faces did not look quite real enough. Writing in a 2007 article about the uncanny valley, John Mangan from The Age cited character's eyes in the film as an example of this phenomenon, where attempts to create realistic humans unintentionally cause revulsion; Peter Travers from Rolling Stone said that it was enjoyable watching the characters at first, but then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements. Nell Minow from Common Sense Media also expressed concerns about realism in the characters, describing the visuals as stunning overall but finding subtle issues with characters talking and acting. Describing the dialogue as passable, Nell also said that the script read like a reject from Pokémon, and that its confusing gibberish about the earth's spirit would not do justice to the beliefs of environmentalists or pantheists. Todd McCarthy from Variety gave a positive review, praising the voice work and visuals though saying the characters were no more emotionally expressive than those in traditional animation. McCarthy described the acting as no worse than the majority of science-fiction films, also saying that as far as video game adaptation films went, The Spirits Within sure beats Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

The Legacy of a Lost Dream

The merger between Square and Enix, which had been under consideration since at least 2000 according to Yasuhiro Fukushima, Enix chairman at the time, was delayed because of the failure of the film and Enix's hesitation at merging with a company that had just lost a substantial amount of money. Square Pictures was closed in late January 2002, largely due to the commercial failure of The Spirits Within. The film's CGI effects have been compared favourably with those in later films, such as Avatar (2009). In 2011, BioWare art director Derek Watts cited The Spirits Within as a major influence on the successful Mass Effect series of action role-playing games. In the first episode of the Square Enix-published 2015 video game Life Is Strange, when the lead character interacts with a TV, she mentions the idea of watching the film, and says I don't care what anybody says, that's one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Although the film was loosely based on a video game series, there were never any plans for a game adaptation of the film itself. Sakaguchi indicated the reason for this was the lack of powerful gaming hardware at the time, feeling the graphics in any game adaptation would be far too much of a step down from the graphics in the film itself. A novelization was written by Dean Wesley Smith and published by Pocket Books in June 2001. The Making of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a companion book, was published by BradyGames in August 2001. Edited by Steven L. Kent, the 240-page color book contains a foreword by director Sakaguchi and extensive information on all aspects of the film's creation, including concept art, storyboards, sets and props, layout, motion capture and animation, as well as a draft of the full script. The film won the Jury Prize at the 2002 Japan Media Arts Festival. It was nominated for Best Sound Editing , Animated Feature Film, Domestic and Foreign at the 49th Golden Reel Awards as well as Best Animated Feature at the 5th Online Film Critics Society awards. Conversely, the film was also nominated in the worst screenplay category at the 2001 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, but lost to Pearl Harbor. The film's trailer was nominated for the Golden Fleece award at the 3rd Golden Trailer Awards. A two-disc DVD version of the film was released on the 23rd of October 2001, with the Blu-ray edition released on the 7th of August 2007. Two weeks before it was released the DVD version was listed on Amazon.com as one of the most-anticipated releases, and it was expected to recoup some of the money lost on the film's disappointing box office performance. The DVD was initially a top seller; in February 2002, Jun Aida said that while sales were still strong, they were not good enough to save Square Pictures from closing. Both versions contained two full-length commentary tracks (one featuring Motonori Sakakibara, sequence supervisor Hiroyuki Hayashida, lead artist Tatsuro Maruyama, and creature supervisor Takoo Noguchi; the second featuring animation director Andy Jones, editor Chris S. Capp, and staging director Tani Kunitake) as well as an isolated score with commentary. They also contained a version of the film in its basic CGI and sketch form, with the option of pop-up comments on the film. An easter egg shows the cast of the film re-enacting the dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller. Fifteen featurettes, including seven on character biographies, three on vehicle comparisons and an interactive Making Of featurette, were also included. Other features included Aki's dream viewable as a whole sequence, the film's original opening sequence, and intentional outtakes. Peter Bracke from High-Def Digest stated the DVD was so packed with extras it was almost overwhelming, stating that Sony went all-out on the extra features in a likely attempt to boost DVD sales and recover losses. A single-disc edition of the film with significantly less special features was released on the 27th of August 2002. As of December 2001, the film grossed in video rental revenue in the United States, equivalent to 83.4% of its box office gross in the country. The DVD was nominated for Best DVD Special Edition Release at the 28th Saturn Awards. Aaron Beierle from DVD Talk gave a positive review of the DVD, rating it 4½ out of 5 stars for audio quality, video quality and special features. Dustin Somner from Blu-ray.com gave the Blu-ray version 5 out of 5 stars for video quality and special features, and 4½ stars for audio quality. Peter Bracke gave the Blu-ray version 4 out of 5 stars overall. The film was released in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray in November 2021, with improved audio to Dolby Atmos/TrueHD 7.1 channel format. Sony made the film available for free on the YouTube channel Throwback Toons on the 5th of December 2023.