Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was an ambitious animated film that aimed to break records – but it nearly spelled disaster for Square.
Video game company Square (now known as Square Enix) has long been known for its fantasy RPG franchise Final Fantasy. The company is now working on the 16th instalment of the highly successful series, but possibly the best-known game is 1997’s Final Fantasy VII.
At around the same time as that game’s release, Square decided to begin dabbling in film production, establishing Square Pictures and starting work on a movie based on their games – Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. (While the film bears the name of the franchise, the only direct connection it has to the games is being directed by their creator Hironobu Sakaguchi).
Released in 2001, it established its place in film history by being the first ever photorealistic animated movie, and was really quite ahead of its time. And yet it bombed at the box office, nearly spelled disaster for Square and has since been largely forgotten.
Let’s take a look at the story of its making, and what exactly went wrong.
Sakaguchi was keen to bring the themes of the Final Fantasy games to film, and so the script was written as a post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic. The Earth is plagued by a deadly alien race that the characters call ‘The Phantoms’, and the film follows scientists Aki Ross and Doctor Sid (if you’re a fan of the games, you’ll know there’s always a Sid, at least in the good ones) as they attempt to study these aliens.
In true Final Fantasy fashion, the antagonists are the military, with the thoroughly unpleasant General Hein looking to put a much more violent end to The Phantoms.
Technological advances
Wanting to make the film photorealistic was an ambitious endeavour and required the first 18 months of production to be spent making an entirely new computer system, which was named SQFlesh. They also (getting a bit techy here) made a custom render farm (which is essentially a high-performance computer system). So, there were clearly a lot of firsts involved in making the movie, which ended up taking a crew of 200 four years to make.
John Edgar Park of Animation World went behind the scenes of the production, and found that by the end of it Square had 15 terabytes of artwork for the film – an absolutely huge amount of data for the time that just shows the impressive scale of the project. Hard drives were only reaching the gigabytes – the very first terabyte drive wouldn’t be released until 2007.
Square’s ambition caught Hollywood’s attention, and it was announced in 2000 that Columbia Pictures would distribute the movie internationally. The Spirits Within also scooped up some Hollywood talent, with Ming-Na Wen, Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Ving Rhames (to name a few) all lending their voices to the films various characters.
The Spirits Within was already set to be record breaking, and yet Square took things one step further. They wanted the main character, Aki Ross, to be the world’s first photorealistic animated actress, and had optimistic plans for her to star in future films.
Of course, it’s 2001, so the best way to market this is to give her the Lara Croft treatment – completely objectify her and put her on the cover of a men’s magazine. In this instance, Aki appeared on the cover of Maxim in a bikini. Strange times.
Mixed reactions
This was all well and good (except the men’s magazine part), but the film started to run into trouble when it ballooned way over budget. In the end it cost Square $137 million, which is worth over $200 million today, and only managed to earn back $81.5 million of that – an obvious flop.
In terms of reviews, the movie had a mixed reception. The animation was simultaneously praised and criticised, with writers noting the impressive rendering of tiny details like skin and hair, yet complaining of Polar Express-style cold, dead eyes. They didn’t actually mention The Polar Express, though. That wouldn’t come out until 2004, so it would have been a bit odd.
The story received the most criticism, with many calling it familiar and The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw referring to it as “adequate.” Ouch.
It seems, then, that the main reason for the film’s failure was that it was too forward-looking, and unable to yet pull off the level of photorealism it was attempting while telling a generic sci-fi tale. Its failure, though, had far-reaching consequences. Square had been due to merge with another video game publisher, Enix, since 2000, and the performance of The Spirits Within very nearly threw a spanner in the works. Who’d want to merge with a company that had just gambled and lost a huge amount of money?
As a result, Square Pictures was shut down in 2002 and the merger went ahead, making Square Enix. So things didn’t end up so badly, and looking back The Spirits Within is a groundbreaking film with a lasting legacy.
Square Enix would later release Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.
In a 2011 interview, Derek Watts, art director on BioWare game Mass Effect 3, cited the film as a big inspiration for the franchise. “We actually reference a lot from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. We used a lot of their GUIs [graphical user interface] and the way they did their ship – that was kind of like in some of the early designs for the Normandy,” he told CVG. He also revealed the attack helicopters in the game and a lot of the technology was based on things in the film.
It wouldn’t be the last time Square made a photorealistic animated film, either. A second, more successful attempt came in the form of 2005’s Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. A direct sequel to the fan-favourite game featuring all of the main (and a lot of the supporting) characters, and directed by prominent character designer Tetsuya Nomura, it was ultimately better received. There was a definite improvement in the CGI animation and it was generally a much more exciting movie – despite being impossible to understand for anyone who hasn’t played the game.
The Spirits Within was undeniably a box office bomb for Square, and artistically speaking it didn’t reach the heights of photorealism it was aiming for, but it’s a film that was a world first and absolutely inspired a lot of what came after it. For that reason alone it’s an interesting piece of cinema history that’s well worth remembering and revisiting.
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