Picture My first 3D CG animation on Blu-ray! Everyone says that the two were created for each other, the digital perfection of 3D animation, and the high definition format that shows such material to the best of its ability. For on Oblivion Island, mirrors have great power, and Haruka’s mirror is the most powerful of them all.
The other thing is that the mirror is the prize possession of the island’s ruler, the Baron, and he needs it for his own nefarious plan.
For one thing, humans aren’t allowed on Oblivion Island. It’s Haruka’s chance to get her mother’s mirror back, and she enlists the aid of the fox spirit that she followed, a youngster named Teo. The various spirits wander into the human world, pick up what is discarded and take it back to use in their bustling island city. She finds herself on Oblivion Island, where all of the lost items wind up. She follows it to a pool of water, and she’s pulled in after it to a magical world. At the shrine she spies a mysterious creature picking up stray items. One day, following a row with her father, she visits a shrine to pray for the return of the mirror. Haruka promised to look after her mother’s treasured hand mirror after she died, but as she grew up, and as she and her father moved away, the hand mirror was forgotten, until later she realised that she had lost it. When she was a child, her mother used to tell her stories of how fox spirits collected the things that humans neglected, and why sometimes those things precious to us would go missing. Haruka is a 16-year-old school girl who grew up, practically alone after her mother died, and her relationship with her workaholic father is strained to say the least. So when it transpired that we would get Oblivion Island: Haruka and the Magic Mirror on Blu-ray and DVD, I wasn’t immediately thrilled to learn that it was another Japanese attempt to take on Pixar and Dreamworks at their own game, and make a proper 3D CGI animated family movie. The subsequent Vexille fell a little flat though, and TO only half worked.
There’s been more success with the halfway house of cel-shaded animation, making 3D characters and environments more resemble their 2D counterparts, and the 2 Appleseed movies were great fun.
Other than the big, budget-busting, and studio-crushing mega extravaganza of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Japanese 3D CG animations have been wholly disappointing, with films like A.Li.Ce and Yuki Terai very low tech, and the more recent Tekken Blood Vengeance little more than an elongated cut-scene. Besides, I haven’t had a lot of luck with Japanese 3D animation, and neither have its storytellers. Even when 3D is used, it gets cel-shaded and flattened down to work with 2D characters and environments. Conversely, when it comes to Japan, and its anime industry, the perception is that it is all 2D or 2D style. At this moment in time, Disney has no traditional style animation in production, it’s all 3D, whether through Pixar or through their own studios. But when it comes to 3D CGI, my first thought is of Pixar and Dreamworks, and even Aardman. Introduction When it comes to CG animation, I always tend to look west (that’s despite the fact that technically, most modern animation, including anime is CG, as the ink and cel stage has been eliminated from even 2D animation).
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