Blue Remains · review
Blue Remains is about 5% coherency away from being totally and completely incomprehensible. It's also either the second or third Ever feature length CGI anime film (Appleseed is about two weeks away from it by release date, but I can't remember whether that's a before two week or an after two weeks). Going into it, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect- plot descriptions on MAL oftentimes fail to capture the full scope of a work. And man. Man, oh man, Blue Remains is something else. The plot of this is like a complete fractured mess of environmentalism, ecofascism, and the kind of unexplained speculative SF thatonly the early 2000s could produce. 50% of this movie is Amamiku (my fluent friend who attended school in Japan remarked upon how ridiculous her name was) swimming around in distress or standing around in distress, then the other 50% is a giant disembodied brain named Glyptofane Sex rambling incoherently about how he is The Absolute Law and must destroy all humans in order to prevent war, thereby starting a war with his three more genial floating disembodied nervous system siblings. Another 0.01% of this movie is Takehito Koyasu.
The art is I think a major failure of this film. All the artistic direction is neatly trimmed to accommodate the technical limitations of the time, with no clever or innovative technical work. There are very few setpieces, even in comparison to its CGI contemporaries, and the human characters are similarly lifeless uncanny valley mannequins with no real stylization or visual interest. It's overwhelmingly, nauseatingly blue and green, and lacks any real sense of cinematography or shot composition. The big climax, which is clearly intended to be visually impressive, is yet another wave of unending and unimpressive green, albeit with small fetuses growing in fruit.
Overall I think that it's difficult to recommend Blue Remains to anyone for any reason, as it's a slog to get through with a dull plot and flat cardboard characters. The literal only thing memorable about this movie is the villain, and even his motives are poorly explained; I do think that his arguing about being The Absolute Law could probably possibly make for a good meme.