Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

• 1. Introduction

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  Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children opened in Japanese theaters on the 14th of September 2005 to an audience that had to earn their seat. Fans could only attend if they were registered members of Square Enix's official "Shinra Company" online fan club. The screening ran once per day at 6:30 p.m. at three venues across Japan. That gatekeeping captures something essential about the film: it was made for people who already cared deeply, who had spent years with Cloud Strife and his companions in the 1997 role-playing game Final Fantasy VII.

  What happens when a studio tries to bring a beloved video game world into a feature-length CGI film? What does it mean to tell a sequel through images rather than gameplay? And can a production team with no filmmaking experience translate characters whose pixel-art proportions were never designed for photorealism? Those are the questions Advent Children set out to answer.

• 2. From Short Film to Feature

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  Kazushige Nojima, who had written the script for the original Final Fantasy VII game, was initially asked to write only a 20-minute short. He decided to write "a story about Cloud and Tifa and the kids". The project was developed by Visual Works, a company Square used to produce CGI sequences for its games, and the early plan was modest in scope.

  Tetsuya Nomura joined the crew after the game's director, Yoshinori Kitase, called him. Nomura was tempted to turn the project into a game, but he stepped back from that idea partly because Visual Works had no experience building games. When early word of the film spread among fans, the response was immediate and intense. Most wanted something feature-length. Nomura expanded the film's runtime from 20 minutes to 100 minutes, a fivefold increase driven entirely by audience appetite.

  By October 2003, with the script written but many characters still undesigned, the film was only 10% complete. Advent Children and the broader Compilation of Final Fantasy VII series were first announced at the Tokyo Game Show in September 2003. The first trailer appeared inside the international version of Final Fantasy X-2 in February 2004, though the motion capture footage in that trailer was later revised for the final cut.

• 3. Character Design Challenges

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  Cloud Strife's final film design combined elements from eight distinct concept iterations, ranging from his blocky super-deformed game appearance to a more realistic look suited for photorealistic CGI. That eight-stage journey reflects how hard the team found the translation from pixel art to believable digital humans.

  Sephiroth presented the greatest difficulty of any character. The staff spent two years refining his look, and the difficulties were significant enough that they reduced his total screen time as a consequence. Takeshi Nozue, who co-directed with Nomura after the two first worked together on Kingdom Hearts, struggled specifically with Tifa Lockhart's proportions, searching for a framework that was "balanced, yet showed off her feminine qualities".

  Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo, the film's trio of antagonists, were designed as physical fragments of Sephiroth's surviving spirit. Each one embodied a different quality: his cruelty, his strength, and his allure. Kenji Nomura, the actor cast as Loz, was told by the staff to voice the character as an "idiot", while Showtaro Morikubo, who played Kadaj, needed time to adjust because of the character's unstable personality. The voice director and Toshiyuki Morikawa agreed that Sephiroth would always sound calm, as if he never feared the possibility of defeat.

• 4. Themes and Symbolism

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  Nojima described the film's theme in a single word: "survival". Cloud carries guilt for failing to save his friends Zack Fair and Aerith Gainsborough, and that guilt takes a visual form. A grey wolf appears onscreen whenever Cloud thinks of them. The wolf vanishes at the film's close when Cloud reaches some resolution.

  Nomura wanted the film to avoid the explanatory mode typical of Hollywood films. Rather than spelling out the meaning of each scene, the staff wanted viewers to arrive at their own interpretations. This intention extended to the film's title: the word "children" refers to the infected children in the plot, but also signals a thematic focus on the next generation. Kadaj and his companions were deliberately designed to be younger than Cloud.

  Geostigma, the incurable disease afflicting Cloud and many others, functions as more than a plot device. Kotaku connected the Midgar survivors' shared illness to the idea of psychological trauma, a wound that Cloud's physical weapons cannot touch. The healing rain that falls at the film's climax, curing the disease, arrives only after Cloud resolves his internal conflict rather than through combat alone.

• 5. Music and Soundtrack

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  Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the original Final Fantasy VII score, returned alongside Keiji Kawamori, Kenichiro Fukui, and Tsuyoshi Sekito. Nomura reviewed each track as it was delivered and sometimes sent composers back to re-record. The arrangements cover orchestral, choral, classical piano, and rock styles; Variety described the range as moving between "sparse piano noodlings, pop-metal thrashings, and cloying power ballads".

  The end theme, "Calling", was written and performed by Kyosuke Himuro, formerly the vocalist of the band Boowy. Some arrangements, including "Advent: One-Winged Angel", were performed by The Black Mages, a rock band formed by Uematsu, Fukui, and Sekito. The 2005 soundtrack album, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Original Soundtrack, collected 26 tracks across two discs. Square Enix published it on the 28th of September 2005. A limited edition with alternative cover art and a lyrics booklet was also produced. The album reached position 15 on the Japanese Oricon music charts and remained on the charts for ten weeks.

  For the 2009 extended version, Himuro collaborated with My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way on a new ending theme titled "Safe and Sound". A larger album, Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete: Reunion Tracks, followed on the 16th of September 2009 with 21 tracks; it appeared on the Oricon charts for a single week at position 108.

• 6. Sales and Reception

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  The DVD releases sold over 410,000 copies in Japan during their first week, with roughly half from the limited edition. Combined DVD and UMD sales in Japan passed 700,000 units within three weeks and crossed one million by January 2006. In the United States, the English-language DVD sold over 832,000 copies by May 2006 and eventually earned over US$58 million in domestic DVD revenue.

  On the American Nielsen VideoScan chart, Advent Children debuted at number 2, which Nielsen's tracking described as a surprise. Nielsen's Top Selling Anime Releases of 2006 ranked it first. The Japan External Trade Organization's 2006 report also named it the best-selling Japanese anime DVD in the United States that year. By May 2009, combined worldwide sales across all versions exceeded 4.1 million copies.

  Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 50% based on 8 reviews, with an average rating of 5.7 out of 10. Reviewers consistently praised the CGI animation; 1UP.com's James Mielke awarded the film an "A-" and called the visuals "genuinely amazing". The plot drew the opposite reaction. Variety's Leslie Felperin described it as "soulless" and "utterly impenetrable" to anyone who had not played the game.

  Advent Children received the Honorary Maria Award at the Sitges Film Festival on the 15th of October 2005 and won Best Anime Feature at the 2007 American Anime Awards.

• 7. The Complete Edition

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  Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete, a director's cut released exclusively on Blu-ray in Japan on the 16th of April 2009, added 26 minutes to the original 101-minute cut and revised roughly one thousand scenes. Cloud's arc received deeper treatment, Denzel's background was expanded, and the fight between Cloud and Sephiroth grew by several minutes, including a new sequence where Sephiroth impales Cloud on his sword and holds him aloft, mirroring a scene from the original game.

  The Complete version introduced a "dirtier" visual style, with characters' faces and clothing becoming progressively darker and more damaged during battle. Themes connecting to other Compilation of Final Fantasy VII titles were woven in, since several entries in that series had been released in the years since the original film. Some child characters, including Denzel and Marlene, had to be entirely recast because the original performers' voices had matured too much in both languages.

  On its first day of release in Japan, the Blu-ray sold over 100,000 copies across all three editions. Gaming outlets Gamasutra and Kotaku credited the release with driving a significant spike in PlayStation 3 console sales during its debut week. In North America, the Blu-ray debuted at number 2 on the Nielsen VideoScan Blu-ray chart with 274,774 units sold in its first week. An Ultra HD Blu-ray edition followed on the 8th of June 2021, released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Advent Children Complete returned to Japanese theaters from the 19th of January 2024 to the 1st of February 2024, and to American theaters on the 21st of February 2024, timed to the launch of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.