Original text at the nekoheadz.org forum

I have to admit, I needed a little break from anime after Higurashi; too much, as my friend Kevin would say, “gruesome fetishized violence.” So this week I’ve only got a couple reviews of some shorter things for you. First up we have a CG movie called Yonna in the Solitary Fortress. Movie might be a little generous, though, as it’s only 33 minutes including the end credits. Given that it’s so short, I’ll try to go easy on the spoilers but there is absolutely nothing to spoil for this.

Yonna in the Solitary Fortress is about a girl named Yonna who lives isolated in a fortress. It’s always nice when there’s a fitting title. Anyway, Yonna happens to have magical powers and, given how people are often portrayed was driven out of her home town along with her older brother while they were both still children. The Federal Government, being of a slightly saner disposition, has heard of Yonna’s powers and wants to join the government forces for an unstated-but-since-it’s-a-government-you-can-assume-it-will-be-sinister purpose. After years and years of talking with Yonna’s fiercely defensive brother, the Federal Government loses patience and sends one of its elite agents, a young man named something forgettable, to “liberate” Yonna from the big stone fortress with his futuristic hand-held computer and grappling hook gun. As it turns out, there’s also another agent who’s been trying to talk his way into the fortress for some time. Yonna ends up torn between her oppressive brother and the dashing young secret agent.

Overall, I get the impression that Yonna in the Solitary Fortress (referred to as FFPY from here on out because it’ll take too long to type Final Fantasy Pretender Yonna) began life as a side project or possibly someone’s lunchtime experiments with a 3D rendering program. Many of the sounds, action, animation, and story feel like they were rushed into place between other projects. I bet FFPY was still being designed, animated, and voiced as the pieces were being put together. The music is, oddly enough, the only thing that doesn’t suffer from this problem. Seeing as the music was probably one of the last things done for FFPY, the folks doing the music could see what they had to work with overall and could work towards putting in something fitting. Though generic and predictable right to the ending j-pop song, I couldn’t help but be impressed because the music seemed to be the only thing done with any skill. I guess the voice-acting was okay, but the voices never quite matched the character actions or expressions. Actually, this brings me to what is probably the weakest part of the show, the animation.

Now I know I’ve said some bad things about three-dimensional computer graphic animation being forced into two-dimensional anime before, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like things in the third dimension. Any Pixar picture and most of the Dreamworks movies rank pretty high in my movie pantheon of sheer awesome, I think the Japanese companies have a way to go to catch up (see my review of Vexille for more details). I did love the Final Fantasy movie, btw; the Spirits Within not that bit of fan-wankery everyone else thinks of. But that’s only one movie. Anyway, FFPY does not do much to help push anime into the format. I will list things off in no particular order: bad shadows, generic designs and horrible faces, the level of detail in the models was beyond that of the textures so things looked really bad for close-ups, the character movement was unnatural (though not the worst I’ve seen, so they get a C+ for that), awkward camera placement, everything was the same damn color, and the voicing never matched any of the mouth movements. In other words, it was like the folks making FFPY didn’t actually have that much experience with 3D animation and they fumbled through as best they could. My standards may be high because of the stuff I usually watch, but the general awkward feeling of the whole thing really killed any attempts the show made to draw me in. The awkward animation would be bearable (shoot, we still enjoy the End of Evangelion despite certain budget issues and trips to the land of stock footage) if it were the only thing that was wrong, but the story even more uncoordinated.

The story in FFPY is this weird blend of Science-Fiction and Fantasy that is as uninspired as it sounds; I call it Final Fantasy Pretender Yonna for a reason. The story doesn’t even make any sense, I mean why would Yonna be the target of persecution when her brother clearly has magical powers, too; though admittedly I guess there’s a difference between shooting little balls of lightning and being able to summon demons and making giant golden lions out of fire and rose petals. I guess in their world people draw the same distinction between summoners and spell-casters that they drew in Final Fantasy IX; it still doesn’t make that much sense since they make it out to be such a bad thing. Really, it’s all just so bloody vague and I have so many questions. I mean, why don’t they have indoor plumbing when they have interplanetary travel? Why would magic seem so bad when they are bound to have found some strange life or even have the different planetary cultures be so foreign they’re alien? We have to assume the Federal Government is evil (admittedly not that hard since they want to abduct Yonna for their own purposes), but are they really that evil or are they just a little more on the ends justifying the means side of things? Why didn’t the secret agent just go flying in on his damn spaceship? FFPY relied on my understanding of Final Fantasy far too much, as if I hadn’t played any of those games (or similar Japanese RPGs) I’d never had understood the setting or the stereotypes for the characters. Actually, everything in the story is borrowed and the writing doesn’t flush out the characters well enough to make up for it. Yonna is forced to make a big decision between potentially killing her brother and saving the elite agent, but it happens so fast and the dramatic pause she takes wasn’t nearly dramatic enough. If the voice acting been better applied and the facial animation done better (so obviously done by someone who’s used to working with 2D anime faces with less detail and range) then maybe the character development would have been there. The story could have been paced better, too, as we only get a picture of what the story is about during the end dialogue; turns out it’s a tale about Yonna’s inner strength and not about the agent’s quest to “save” her. Had the writing been going in that direction sooner I might have known that and been more in tune with it during the key scenes.

While it sounds like I didn’t like FFPY, (it’s true, I didn’t) I might recommend it for one rather amazing scene that was put in more as a bit of fluff but really defined the character Yonna for me. Yonna captures the agent (as opposed to letting her brother kill him), but in a moment of self-doubt and depression in response to his efforts to persuade her to leave Yonna summons a little flying demon (although instead of fire or smoke, Yonna’s magic happens in a flurry of rose petals and makes quite the sight with the little demon) to try and cheer her up. She summons ugly butt-naked little creature and then curls up in a ball on her bed. I then watched as the little creature flew around and made cute noises and poses to try and get her to loosen up; in the face of failing efforts, the little demon then summons/turns into a big bright green naked horned demon. The big demon then makes some poses before sitting on the bed next to Yonna in resignation. However, given the demon’s size he bounces her pretty high when he sits, so he scoots closer to Yonna and bounces her a lot as he does so. She cracks a smile and looks away to see the little demon just waiting and smiling. Yonna smiles and cheers up, but the interaction is interrupted as someone comes into her room. A shining moment of brilliant storytelling and execution, this scene actually made me glad I watched FFPY. I’m detailing it here because I don’t think any of you will actually watch this series, but I just wanted you to try and get a feel for what characterization is. See, we saw Yonna react and we saw that she was a deep and complex character just for the sheer fact that she summoned something to cheer her up and then completely ignored it so it would work even harder. The way the rest of the characters were characterized was the simple way of someone saying they were a certain way or by having the character say it themselves. I can’t be told by a character that they are sad and have it have the same effect as seeing them be made sad and reacting to it. There’s a wonderful line in the last episode of Futurama (the series and not the made for DVD movies) where the robot devil shouts at Fry: “You can’t just have your characters tell us how they feel, that makes me angry!” (Note: quote may not be exact.) Anyway, that one scene, good as it was, left me wondering what happened with the rest of FFPY.

I’ll be honest, here, I can’t recommend Yonna in the Solitary Fortress after all. The way everything just seemed slapped together like it was being stuck together before it was even done really killed this show for me. Excuse me, killed this half-hour movie for me. I jokingly said that this may have been put together on someone’s lunch break, but the more I think about it the more that’s probably true. Given how unoriginal the thing was all around and how unfamiliar everyone seemed with the animation tools and direction, I can’t help but think this is something someone started making on their own and then their boss saw it and said “hey, let’s finish it properly.” Unfortunately, the story just can’t stand on it’s own and the characters just aren’t strong enough to pull it off (if they had just focused solely on Yonna it may have worked, but the focus kept shifting back to that elite agent). I don’t feel like I completely wasted the half-hour I spent watching it or even the time spent writing this review, mainly because of the scene I detailed earlier, but also because it so clearly demonstrates how a lack of harmony with the three parts of music-animation-story can ruin something great. FFPY was bad enough to remind me that there is plenty of crap and I’m glad I’m searching for new things so I can find it all and make fun of it. If it ever gets a release stateside I will send a letter asking them to call it Final Pretender Yonna (drop the Fantasy to avoid copyright issues, naturally); that would be the only way I’d buy it.

~Whim

PS – I watched this as a fansub from Ureshi.
PS2 – I recently saw Battle for Terra, and I have to say for an indie flick it had a lot of polish and a good story, so there are examples of lower budget CG productions out there.
PS3 – Turns out since there aren’t really any legal barriers at this point, some of the fansub groups are going ahead with Queen’s Blade for those of you with a need for the massive boobage. I’m actually working on tracking down some more stuff like Kaiba, though.