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Editorial Review:
Style trumps substance in Renaissance, a 2006 French film whose breathtaking visuals largely overcome its shortcomings in the areas of story and character development. Detailed in a lengthy and absorbing "making of" featurette, the film's look is a combination of CG animation, motion capture, and a palette consisting solely of black & white (there are a few splashes of color late in the proceedings, but no gray whatsoever). And while it has a few obvious antecedents (the filmmakers readily acknowledge the influence of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, not to mention the much earlier, Expressionist work of Fritz Lang and Orson Welles), Renaissance, with its commingling of heavily processed live action and graphic novel sensibilities, looks very little like anything you've ever seen before. The setting is Paris in the year 2054, and it is here that director Christian Volckman and his crew do their best work.
The French capital is certainly recognisable (the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre's Sacre Coeur are two familiar landmarks), but its classic architecture is glazed with all manner of futuristic touches, from vast glass penthouses to layers of transparent walkways outside Notre Dame Cathedral; and with the preponderance of the action taking place at night, frequently in the rain, the City of Light more often suggests a very literal representation of film noir. As for the story, it's nothing special. Hard-nosed police Captain Barthélémy Karas (voiced in this English version by Daniel Craig) is searching for a female scientist who works for Avalon, one of those sinister mega-corporations that seem to run everything in movies like this; seems the woman, who has been kidnapped, possesses what's referred to as "the protocol for immortality," and Avalon, which promises good health, beauty, and long life for all, desperately wants her back. The characters are a bit stiff (physically and otherwise), the dialogue is occasionally stilted, and the film is sometimes so dark that it's hard to tell what's going on. But most of Renaissance looks so amazing that such deficiencies can easily be ignored, at least the first time through. --Sam Graham
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
The Designer's Film I watched this film not knowing it's associations. The fact that it featured a superb cast of actors was unknown to me. I had no idea of the plot or the background to it's creation. The first thing that hits the viewer is the extraordinarily fine design. In fact this film is 'designed' to within an inch of it's life. The sheer amount of work in every shot is deeply impressive. It's also an example of it's time in which late sixties image styles are hyper-accentuated with the inclusion of... more info
The future of films? The stark black and white rotoscope style animation of this film is striking. I like it very much as unlike in films with CGI it makes the environments appear seamless with the protagonists. Because this is a science fiction film this is very useful as it allows the presentation of Paris some fifty years hence to be more acceptable. The story is a winding sort of affair, starting with the disappearance of a young researcher after an argument with her sister and a maverick cop's rescuing of a kid from a... more info
Eye candy - it won't fill you up. I wanted to love this film. I was wearing socks when I started watching this film - and I wanted it to blow them off. The visuals take a few minutes to get used to - the stark contrasting black and white animation is very flash, and some scenes - especially the cityscapes were dazzlingly stylish. The way shadows were used was very impressive. Some have knocked the story for being unoriginal - but I thought it was okay. A good dystopian plot - which became quite predictable at one point, but... more info
Detection in black and white. As is my verdict. Renaissance is a very slick black and white animation. The cityscapes of this Paris of the future are especially impressive - be it the topside, the glass covered roadways, or the sections below and in the sewers. The wide panorama shots of the city are just stunning. When it comes to the people, however, I feel this form of animation lends itself rather less well. Some of the characters animations get lost in the cut-over between black and white. Also, because the animation isn't modelled on the actual... more info
