Renaissance (2006)

Such a frustrating disappointment

People are voting emotionally.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

The visuals are not for everyone, but I loved it. High contrast, ultra- minimalist, black and white graphics that gives the sense of an unknown time in the future, a high-tech, ultra-modern, cyber-punkish future of glass-and- steel buildings juxtaposed with old Parisian buildings and streets.It was beautiful. But that's where it ends.The story is very, very weak. The voice acting is not that special. The cinematography isn't that great either. This could've made a great short film or a music video, but for a full-feature film, it might have been just a little bit too long. I'm not sure if it's the graphics or the story, but I got bored and wanted it to end. A more interesting story would've kept me watching, but it simply wasn't there.This is the problem with many films over the last decade - great CGI, great acting, great visuals, great sound, poor scripts. You would think that with animation the only limit is your own imagination - you can create a story about literally anything without any budget restrictions. You want dinosaurs? Draw them. You want flying cars? Draw them. But even without these restrictions this film still made a generic plot that is TV film standard. Generous 6 for animation mostly.

Blade Runner (Deckard is a Replicant!), City of Lost Children (augmented senses or whatever used and abused and mostly, well, just giving us far less than what we might dream of), andDark City: These really ought to be added.For a while now, I've been waiting for an animated film that might affect me as much as Miyazaki's stuff has. This one is the 1st.Hmm, scratch the "animated" part of that.I have an intense love-hate relationship with film noir and, hey, if you don't leave, it must be mostly love, right? But, there are so many sci-fi and noir themes totally submerged in this film that it's just a wonder to watch.These people did an incredible job!

My problems with this film fall into several categories.1. It's another reason why the French should not make Science Fiction - i.e."Fantastic Planet", "The Fifth Element", "Le Jetee" (interesting but like your uncle's slide shows if your uncle hallucinates)2. Why is this movie animated - same question as "A Scanner Darkly" and "Sin City". There really wasn't anything in it that couldn't be done in a non-animated film.3. Why wasn't it better animated - same question as "Sin City". If they were going to animate it - could we do it without eye strain?4. Why bother with spoiler alerts since it was so incomprehensible as to make any spoilers more like explanations? People come and go, events happen, but it made no real sense. I clicked on spoiler alert so - why the big deal with the stolen car? Why the whole - "You're out of control so we'll help the bad guys and suspend you" - the film takes place in 2054 and the plot is out of a film from the 1940's. Sorry just not a good film.

Punctuating the opening credits sequence is a swarthy man having a strange, all-too-real nightmare. Closing in on its dystopic 2054 Paris, the film begins to follow a woman into a grungy club, where she and a Slavic bartender convene outside on the deck. They toss exclamations at each other to the effect that she owes him more money although she believes she's paid it all. Another woman obstructs the budding violence, only to have a bitter fight with the woman herself. The initial woman storms out, and she is kidnapped. Christian Volckman's Renaissance appears to be another one in an assembly line of recent motion-capture-animated sci-fi noir pictures, but in spite of whether or not that is essentially true, it tells a neatly arranged, classically unraveling detective story that keeps us in the dark in its opening minutes, even whilst introducing Karas, the hard-boiled cop we recognize from the beginning as the man awakening from a terrible dream.The rudiments of classic film noir are all hit upon without any anachronistic changes, for all intents and purposes. It is in the harshness of its monochrome that Volckman's French thriller has followed no example. For the film's animators, unfettered by the challenges of physical lighting that would normally be faced, have been able to begin with a totally black frame, and to affix utter pitch-white according to the action on screen. As they scrupulously imitate the effects of real light sources throughout the frame, the distinction of black and white here is full-blown without even any of the slightest shades of gray to tone with the characters' less starkly definite moral codes, and the outcome is a harsh and judgmental vision of the direction in which commercial civilization is going, sporadically caused to undergo the most blaring and ruthless of illumination. It is the artistic study of film noir taken to their visual boundary of its philosophy, and nothing before has ever shared quite the same execution of this visual concept.All the characters in this decent cyberpunk film seem as if to have been walk off with purely from a Gothic comic book in black ink, but all together their physical responses, their motions and the nuances of their facial expressions look ashore within a clear humanity. Normally, films that try out new developments in animation allow their technical advances upstage all other facets of production. Sin City, for example, left substance and overall good screen adaptation from its source material to be desired.It may not be mind-blowing, it may have its narrative conventions and its voice-over cast may simply be adequate, but Renaissance, made for $19 million over six years, not only feels like actual noir instead of a rashly penned appropriation, but also is not secondary to all the visual innovation, which is played as if to be incidental. One leaves thinking not so much about how cool it is when Karas is evading bullets shot through a crowded glass Parisian street, but more about its ponderance of life and death, how life's tragedies, such as death, make life meaningful.