Retronauts - 733: Episode 733 Preview: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

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Hey everybody, what you're about to hear is a free preview of a podcast on our $5 exclusive episodes tier at patreon.com slash retronauts. And if you want to hear the whole thing, please go to patreon.com slash retronauts and sign up at the $5 exclusive episodes tier. Once you do that, you'll get access to all of our previous exclusive episodes and our future ones as well, as long as you remain a patron, and our exclusive episodes will launch every other Friday. Again, that is the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. And I'll let you get to this free preview of one of our exclusive episodes. So I want to move on to what was happening in the world of animation and movies in general. So what was Disney up to?

Well, they were still critically and commercially successful, but public interest is waning in their kind of feature, annual feature movie. And the studio is going to have a rocky time in the early odds getting back on their feet. And then we have Pixar at that point is a wholly independent studio. Disney is distributing their movies, but they're doing something new. new everyone is very excited about Pixar by the time the spirits within comes out they have uh i believe only three movies and then uh monsters ink follows right after this movie is released so they're just uh really taking off in terms of um getting their animation studio off the ground and garnering excitement over what they're doing and then the cg i movie would become the dominant

form of the um of that movie in the west at least and then i've done this animation movie podcast for a very long time. And I find it very interesting that in 2001, people were given three different options for the future of the animated film. And it would determine, I want to say, the next 10 years of the animated film in the West, potentially the next 15 years. So we had this movie, which was essentially photorealism with digital actors. It's like they could make this as a movie with people, but they didn't. And it's going to fool you. And it's something you've never seen before. That's what was promised to you. And for the most part, that was true. So that was option one. Option two was

Disney's Atlantis, which opened around the same time, and this was, we're going to get rid of all that music. We're all sick of the music, too. It's going to be PG-rated, high adventure, a little much of a harder edge. Mike Minola is going to do the character designs. It's going to be meeting the people who

grew up with Disney in the 90s. Now they're teenagers or young adults, and we're going to give them something that they would like. Nobody saw that. And then the third option is Shrek, and everybody like Shrek. And Shrek would become the dominant kind of animated movie. You need it. all of your pop culture jokes, you need celebrities attached,

you need hideous character designs. And that is a song. Yes, exactly, a dance party, which this movie does not end with. Although there is the thriller, the thriller dance bonus clip. I was thinking of that, which I think I've seen that more

than I've seen this film. So, yeah, in 2001, there are many studios saying, okay, we know the musical, the animated Broadway musicals is kind of getting stale here are some options and they were like we want Shrek give us more Shrek and then I wanted to also note like just broadly speaking Japan wasn't an economically weak in state at this point they were less of a threat to America in terms of you know the economy and so we were now embracing Japan as oh it's the fun country with all the zany stuff so we we started to like Japan we weren't ready to fully embrace Japanese or Asian media broadly at this point but we were ready for things with like a little bit of Japaneseness like the Matrix for example example and even like episode one had some kind of like Asian flair to it in general.

And speaking of episode one, 99 Star Wars episode one hit and we were like, we don't want this either. Somebody please fill the gap. Give us a beautiful, gorgeous sci-fi epic that's not Star Wars. Star Wars went incredibly wrong. I feel like a lot of the kind of stylistic elements and even some concepts for how to use computer animation were picked up six months later by. Lord of the Rings,

the Fellowship of the Ring. You know, you have things like the soaring score, which is almost inappropriate for this movie. It's so like classical Hollywood. I actually thought it was

a Jerry Goldsmith score at first, you know, like something out of Star Trek. But it's not. It just kind of has that feel to it. And then, you know, you've got the,

the hordes of creatures clashing. This wasn't the first movie to do CGI object battle. that it is now basically how every movie with any hint of action ends. But it was definitely a pioneer in that space. Maybe the first to come out to do that since, you know,

Episode 1, Star Wars Episode 1, because you didn't get the Matrix sequels until the following year. And that's kind of where they picked that up again. Yeah, you're right. Lord of the Rings is another one of those movies where we're going to give you something you've never seen before, especially the second movie where Gollum is the digital actor. And even though we had seen Jar Jar, we were like, no, Gollum is the thing that impresses us. Jar Jar, maybe he impressed us at the time, but he's annoying in Gollum, he's endearing, we're laughing at

Gollum jokes, he can carry a scene by himself. So, yeah, we're seeing more of that digital actor idea implemented in a better way after this movie. And I think another point that we should probably make is that whatever performance capture they did for this movie, I think it's pretty clear that they had motion capture actors and they had the Hollywood actors giving their voices and the two did not meet at all. Whereas, you know, you just mentioned Gollum, you can go back.

You can find clips of Andy Circus wearing the suit, making all the faces and doing all his crazy voices and it's magnificent. And I feel like that's the energy that is missing from this film because while I personally, you know, watch this again yesterday, I could feel

the actors like, they're working, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're working, you know, Ving Rames is there. He's emoting, Steve Buscemi is doing Steve Buscemi stuff, but then you look at the face Steve Buscemi's words are coming out of, and you're like, who is that? That's not Steve Buscemi.

Yeah, that's a major issue. I have. We're going to talk about the tech pretty soon, but I feel like there's also an uncanny valley aspect where it's like, if I see this face in this kind of skull shape and the body, I can understand like what kind of voice should come out of this, but it's not, it's not Alec Baldwin. It's not Steve Buscemi. I feel like a lot of these

characters' voices are completely disconnected from the figure that they're inhabiting. But, Yeah, I had the exact same issue as you did Diamond. On the other hand, I'm glad that they didn't just CG everyone's faces, like the actor faces. You know, they started doing that in some DreamWorks animations. What was that one? The fish one with Will Smith. Oh, Sharktail.

Yes, the fish looks like Will Smith. And I don't want to see that. Like, no thanks. I'm glad they didn't go that far. But, yeah, there's just, there is a disconnect. And I watched the behind the scenes, you know, 30, 30 minute documentary on this movie. and you do see the mocap actors and none of them are

the actual actors who are giving the voices to the characters although they did do a lot of work to make the motion of mouths consistent with what the actors were doing in the booth so like they're showing like side by side of Aki and Mingna Wen

and like how they're linking up the motions of Aki's mouth to the way me, Na's mouth moves. So, you know, they did put that effort into it, but there is that element of physicality that's missing, like the whole body acting. I think that's where it kind of

falls short. And this is in Roger Ebert's review, so I'm stealing this idea, but he put it in my brain and it can't escape. It's the fact that Grave, the Alec Baldwin character, he looks disturbingly like Ben Affleck. So whenever he opens his mouth, you're like, well, you're, you're, your, Alec Baldwin, get out of Ben Affleck's body.

Stop haunting this man. That is all over letterboxed. All the top comes to letterbox like why, why does this movie star Ben Affleck? And it's like, the answer is Ben Affleck was a big star at the time. So, yeah, if they're making a white guy hero with that kind of haircut, like, oh, yeah, why don't we use this guy who's in all the movies who are all over the box office right now? Yeah, we don't really know any behind the scenes details for the most part. We know some very scant details. But I want to think that at some point Ben Affleck said yes and then later said no, and they're like, crap, we modeled this character.

We've already animated him. Who else can we get? It just, there is a disconnect. We'll talk about it when we talk about casting and the technical. and everything like that. It's too bad. They must have cut the love scene because we don't have to see

Gray's giant back tattoo. That's true. Or him getting Dunkin' Donuts? Oh, Ben Affleck. Anyway, so how did this movie come into being? The thing is, we don't know because we're not allowed to ask about it, apparently, but we do know that in 1997,

here in Obosakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, founded Square Pictures. This is a division of Square dedicated to CGI technology. It was founded in Hawaii, and I think the dude just likes Hawaii. I think Nobu Ohemitsu also likes Hawaii as well. I think they're just Hawaii bros, and they like hanging out there and surfing.

That's just the impression that I get. ...you know...