A Final Fantasy

The anime film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children is a demonstration of what computer-animated imagery is capable of today. The detail of the animation, movement and gestures (ok, not all gestures) is astonishing. In a sense, Advent Children expresses the superhumanity of its characters through its speed (assuming that the scenes are still fluent and coherent if played in slow motion), where the movie The Matrix chose the opposite approach by introducing “bullet-time” (slow motion). To be honest, the action scenes were beyond my sensual capacities, making the attempt to grasp the details a pretty exhausting experience.
To this extent, Advent Children shares some commonality with what Walter Benjamin (1936) called “shock effect of the film” in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He used the term to describe the interruption of any associative process due to mere speed of changing images in movies. Benjamin considered this shock effect to be an equivalent to the peril of his time, and even argued that it helps people to get used to the permanent and growing danger that surrounds them.
Couldn’t it be that movies like Advent Children demand a new kind of literacy from their audience? While for Benjamin, the movies of his time prevented the viewers from contemplating their content, Advent Children seems to suggest to abandon any hope of sensually perceiving its content fully in the first place. Maybe the experience is more relaxing if we don’t try to decode the fast movement. Instead, we might have to encode the complex action, meaning to perceive a high speed battle as singular algorithmic event and concentrate on its result, 0 or 1, win or loose and its connection to the next event or unit. In this sense, it resembles the genre of role-playing games, in which its model, Final Fantasy VII, is located. Even the development of the protagonist of the movie is expressed in terms of the character development in video games, namely increased fighting skills.
Such literacy would not only target the content, but also the visual representation of the movie. In this respect, Advent Children reminded me of my own experience and observations of the first-person-shooter Quake III Arena. Here, the player can configure and adjust her graphics in order to change the information sent to her screen. Referring to Retaux and Rouchier (2002), Jesper Juul (2005: 139-140) for example illustrates how the player can reduce graphical detail (see figure 1).

Figure 1: High (top) and low (bottom) graphical detail in Quake II Arena. Source: Juul 2005, p.140.

If my memory of the modification Quake III Rocket Arena isn’t mistaken, the players can further manipulate their camera to depict a wider angle, thereby increasing the range of vision. This leads to a distorted view that has something of a fisheye-lens, in exchange for more information on the screen. According to Juul, this is not only done in order to improve performance, but also shows that “[e]xperienced players shift their focus from the fictional world of the game to the game as a set of rules. […] Skilled players know that the textures on the wall are not relevant to the playing of the game.”
In a similar way, Advent Children seems to demand from its viewers to develop “functional viewing strategies” – including a new kind of configured visualization. Maybe it shows one (distant but possible) future of movie experience. Parallel to the individual configurations allowed in Quake III, a new kind of individualized movie could allow the viewer to decide, how much information she would like to get. Although still very much related to varying internet connection speed, video streaming often facilitates a choice of high and low quality (resolution). In a sense, this already is a first step in the direction of individualized visualization. Does Advent Children point in the direction of such a final fantasy of computer-aided viewing? Would we want it to?