Friday, September 12, 2014

Anime Juke Box - The Dream Within - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

So you could make a strong argument that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is not technically an anime film. But It is based on a Japanese game, created by a Japanese animation company and has a lot of elements commonly found in Japanese anime. While the movie is often considered a considerable box office bomb, I've always thought it was an interesting experiment.

 One element that caused a lot of anger among fans of the video game series was the fact that an American Hollywood composer was brought in to work on the score. Of course this composer is anything but typical. Elliot Goldenthal has a very unique and atonal style and he created one of his most epic sounding and powerful scores for Final Fantasy. The main theme for hope and love in this movie was used as the basis of the song The Dream Within, and was performed during the end credits by Lara Fabian. You rarely see this kind of integration of a theme from the score into a song. Only James Bond does it regularly. Goldenthal's theme adapts very well and Fabian's voice is quite lovely. Enjoy.

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2 comments:

  1. SFFSeptember 12, 2014 at 8:19 AM

    I loved the score to this film including the vocal theme track you mention. Lovely.

    Anyway, a really underrated film.

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    1. Roman J. MartelSeptember 15, 2014 at 8:55 AM

      Yeah I really liked the movie when it came out and was surprised by all the negative reviews. Things have seem to have gotten worse as time went on. I think it one of those movies, like "Waterworld" where everyone assumes that since it bombed in the box office that it is a bad movie. It is not a bad movie at all, but it was certainly not what Final Fantasy game fans wanted, and it was not what animation fans expected. I'll need to give this a re-watch and full review in in the future.

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