It looks great! But characters that do impossible things for cool shake and are invincible are also impossible to make people care for them…

Reminds me of a video game!

It looks really cool though, and honestly I’m surprised that there aren’t a ton of films like this already. Animation is really strong at doing awesome action shots, and other than Final Fantasy Advent Children, I can’t think of anything else done recently in this kind of style.

I wish him luck. I’d pay to see more like this!

Very nice. Loved it. But I could swear I’ve seen it before, a million times, in various anime productions…

Eh, looks like the opening cinematic to a videogame. I’m not sure I can find Matrix-style cuts into and out of slow-motion in and of themselves to be enough to make an action scene engaging anymore. Instead all I’m finding myself doing is asking questions about why he’s doing what he’s doing…

if he can run so fast, why does he even bother striking a cool pose and waiting for all the soldiers to surround him? He could just leave them in his dust
if his little flashbang thing helped him dispatch a bunch of those soldiers, why did he stop, strike a cool pose, and then notice there were more soldiers to dispatch right there? They didn’t appear to be new soldiers fresh on the scene or anything…
if his intention was to get to the city below, (and he could seemingly land safely from any height) why did he leap onto that bridge (and wait around striking a cool pose) allowing the flying gun battery to spot and take shots at him?
if he was tricking the rocket into hitting the giant scorpion, why did he even bother cutting off its leg as he ran past it?

All this is doing is saying “this character is cool, look how cool he is”, which is fair enough visually but it doesn’t make me care about what’s going on. It was nice for a moment when he appeared to actually be afraid of the giant scorpion, but that only lasted for a moment. It still posed not much of a threat to him. I dunno, maybe I’m just being harsh, but it wasn’t interesting to watch. Like watching someone else playing a videogame.

too many cliche’s to count. the plot sounds a lot like star wars and the trailer did nothing to make me care… about anything…

the animation is decent, but there was nothing new being brought to the table. and blue hair? c’mon. this isn’t a 1998 playstation game.

The sound design was awesome! That really sold most of the action. I also loved the jumping, falling and landing stuff. It felt meaty.

The pauses, waiting for things to happen (yeah wtf are with those guards, he’s just standing there shoot him) and the slowmo stuff needs to be cut back.

Overall it was quite fun

Weapon porn. Who but 15yr old boys is interested in that?

Adam C already pointed out all impossibilities. This kind of film is always an insult in the face of everyone with just a glimpse of knowledge about physics. It is sold as set in the future, yet it even doesn’t know of recent features of actual weapons – it only works as long as the machines stay as stupid as in 1950. And I hate films which only work because the characters act stupid.

I really, really like to see for once a film with machines acting different from the cliché gunman of the CGI corral. What about medical robots? House building machines? Harvesting, mining, transportation, – lots of ways to show their intelligence, and still lots of opportunity to let them go postal, if necessary. The most intelligent film about this topic still is “Robocop” by Paul Verhoeven.

Quote from director “I knew I could not get a emotional reaction with only 5 minutes of screen time… So instead of trying to half ass my story into a 5 minute short film…” he just made it look FRIGGEN SWEET. It’s all well to try and blow our minds with plumpalicious visuals but please…you don’t really believe what your saying mr. director, I hope you don’t…

because if you do, pause and realize that you could have doubled interest and hits with a few more weeks in the story room and I’ll bet you could have halved your render times…

I’ll stop to say it’s gorgeous and I salute all that work…but I’ve saluted beer commercials for how good they’ve looked.

p.s You couldn’t get an emotional REACTION with 5 mins of screen time, are you freaking kidding me!

It certainly looks nice… Great animation and all, but I think a more appropriate title would have been “Azureus Melodramatically Landing”.

BOR-RING. I kept wanting to hit the triangle to skip this cutscene. Yes yes, lots of things going boom very prettily. Lots of glossy bits and weird camera angles. But that crap is dead easy with the tech we have these days. There wasn’t a single organic object in the entire segment, and that includes the lazy-ass anime hairstyle of the central character.

There’s more emotion, talent, and joy in one frame of the RIO trailer than in this entire short.

It looks nicely polished but with all due respect to the people that worked hard on it, there’s no way I could ever watch this as a feature length movie. I could barely sit through the preview. Obviously there’s not much story here, but even then the action had every cliche in the book, usually on display three or four times (hero lands in dramatic three point stance, weary but ready to kick some butt). I think focusing on what the story is actually about would have been more fruitful, but judging by the vague synopsis on the website, story is not exactly going to be a priority. Best of luck, I genuinely hope everyone involved can prove me wrong and produce a great feature.

I wasn’t sold until I saw the giant robot scorpion. That’s really cool! I just wish there wasn’t a slo-mo shot every two seconds.

I love how his entirely HUMAN face makes the audience identify with him!

And how WARM the environment is!

And how the creator’s name CLEARLY sounds Japanese!

To the creator of this piece: Technically very well done….but….you really need a good WRITER.

I think Stone hit the nail on the head calling this a 1998 playstation game as it completely reeks of being an intro to a videogame from that era.

That being said, it was still fairly entertaining. I’m not sure if it could work for a full feature, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

Was that the same scorpion war-robot as Transformers movie? At least that scorpion robot was suitably in the desert.

I like it though. I mean, yeah, those comic book hero poses are not that original, but they are done well and will work well for the audience that likes it. It’s an obvious fit for that action-animation genre and style, and I think it’s high production value makes it a nice addition to that pool. Definitely not a good movie for the bitter “so-cliche!” critic, but great for genre fans who can accept the standard comic book aspects of it. I hope it gets made; it’ll be added to my Netflix que.

I think this clip is being judged a little too harshly. It’s a test clip, a tech demo. You wouldn’t judge a cartoon’s potential based on a walk cycle. I think it does a great job at doing what it’s supposed to do: show that the animator, director, sound tech and composer have the potential to make an exciting movie, given a good script.

I think what’s falling short for a lot of people here, though they might not think it – is the influence of NOT ENOUGH anime.
The rendering and design is very Clone Wars informed, the shot composition is pure IMAGI and the action directing is off-the-shelf Tartakovsky.
All those influences are already second hand.

Maybe it’s the most elaborate introduction to a self-parody ever seen.

You all seem so jaded, it’s kinda sad. LOL…I liked it. I liked it ALOT and I loved the sound. I’m looking forward to seeing more.

I don’t think this is terrible or anything, but I think that this could be much stronger. I haven’t read all the comments so excuse me if I repeat.

I think what’s hurting this video the most is that there’s absolutely zero tension. The ninja guy doesn’t seem to get hurt and he doesn’t look like he’s trying very hard to defeat his enemies. We’re not going to empathize very much with a character who effortlessly defeats all his enemies, and we’re certainly not going to feel any tension.

The over-posing has been mentioned, but I wanted to repeat it because it’s just carried WAY too far. Little things like stumbling after he falls, narrowly escaping getting hit, etc. could add a lot of character.

When he jumps in the air and fires down at the soldiers, some of them start falling before they’ve been hit.

If you’re going to have 5 minutes of fighting, then you need to think of creative ways to surprise the audience as the fight progresses. Just watching two guys attack each other back and forth will only hold the audience’s attention for so long before the audience starts waiting for the next THING to happen. You need to have SOMETHING about your approach to the fight that is unique, and you also need to progressively escalate the circumstances (going from soldiers who don’t hurt him to a big machine that doesn’t hurt him isn’t escalating anything). There needs to be something interesting in his approach to taking these guys out. Right now I think it’s just too straightforward and monotonous.

Anyway these are just my initial opinions about it, I didn’t want to sound harsh, but I feel strongly about this. This is somewhat different to the kinds of animated features we normally see and I’d like to see this genre explored more within features, but there’s no need to go too cheesy and there’s no need to sacrifice story. I hope that doesn’t end up being the case with this movie.

i think this piece is like if we would follow a villion… maybe because this cool guy is like Vegeta form Dragon Ball suited up in a half-life robot suit. or because we dont see his eyes, so we dont see any actual emotions, but mostly because of his flawless action. it is really like watching how invincible is the bad guy who has to be broken down, and save the world from. he is an evil ronin. (thats why this piece reminds me that scene from Kung fu panda, where the bad guy escapes from the super safe prison)

Something as simple as a bit of a limp after falling several hundred feet from above would have earned this so much good will. We see his ears, so we can suspect he’s human – so come on, director, -show us- he’s somehow different than the robots he so ably slaughtered. As it is, he just performed like a somewhat more polished machine.

I also agree with Zed a few posts previous – this guy WOULD make a fine villain. His performance was too perfect and badass-pose-ridden to be a hero.

Well, let’s hope this interesting but flawed piece paves the way to something great. Good luck, Mr. Weinstein.

He’s got my support.