Technotise: Edit & I

I couldn't believe something like this came from Serbia. The movie is amazing. The story, the animation, the design, the mood... It's thrilling! Before I start in-depth reviewing, first I'll say - thank god it's NOT a kids' movie. I'm really into animation and I hate how big world-famous cartoon studios make so many children cartoons, that on the mention of word 'cartoon' people think of something for kids. This is NOT a children musical, it's an animated movie for grown-ups. (Some scenes may even be inappropriate for children)

OK, now where do I start? OK, story first...

The story is fantastic. The movie never felt boring, the story really keeps you interested. Don't worry, I won't give out too much, don't wanna spoil the movie, so I'll just keep it simple - It's a futuristic story. It's NOT some Sci-Fi adventure with impossible inventions and space traveling action - it's just happening in the future, things are still simple, it's just about an ordinary girl (Edit) who is a psychology student and who, after 6 failed exams, decides to implant a memory chip inside her to help her pass the exams. She also has a job at some state security agency or something in taking care of an autistic math genius who discovered an important formula, but no computer was able to calculate it. Once she sees the formula and the chip remembers it, weird things start happening to her, and it gets more and more exciting. :D The characters are very good, and the humor is really great and refreshing for the dramatic and kinda emotionally-hard story. So the story is 10/10.

Next.... Design/Animation The movie is pure eye candy! The camera angles, the colors, the imaginativeness... Really great. Animation is a combination of 3D and traditional 2D animation. 3D is mostly for backgrounds in some scenes where camera changes the angle and so, but characters and objects are always 2D. Which I really liked, cause cartoons sometimes can seem too 2-dimensional, you know, no rotating camera, just translating left- right, so that's a plus if you ask me. As for 2D animation, it's perfect. It was done by professional comic artists so it's no wonder. You can see that in some parts they increased frame rate with CG in- betweens, but the movie was made on a really low budget and was done by literally 10 - 20 people (no wonder it took them like 5 years to finish) so I'm OK with it. The design and backgrounds of the movie are fantastic too! As I said pure eye candy! Backgrounds are also hand-drawn which gives the movie it's artistic feeling and always fit the mood of a scene. To Animation/Design/Art I give 10/10.

Music.... It's very good too. It was beautifully composed and every score fits the scene perfectly. There is one 'featured' song too (from artists outside the project), which was also chosen very well and fits the movie. The main theme is epic! (especially the version which starts with piano, the other remix is played in the movie tho). 9/10

So all in all, it's a movie worth to watch. I guarantee you'll like it. Trust me, I myself was totally skeptical towards it since I hate sci-fi and futuristic stuff, and it blew me off!

I'm a little bit biased here, all right? While not Serb, as someone who still lives on the Balkans and actually likes most things Serbian, their movie, well, industry included, I approached this with great expectations. And was not disappointed. Might be the familiar actor voices, might be the visual style, might be the whole idea of cyberpunk plot taking place in familiar settings, you won't get out of your own country's movie, well, industry, let alone properly executed. I don't know. The story, while not necessarily original, fits really well in that setting. And watching this in 2021 was quite cyberpunk in its own right.

Aleksa Gajic is a new name to me, but in Serbia he is a famous comic writer and sketch artist. This film is based on one of his comic books.

This animated feature is not for kids but for adults, teenagers and for people who like Kôkaku kidôtai/ Ghost in the Shell(1995), Akira (1988), Renaissance (2006), Cowboy Bebop: Tengoku no tobira/ Cowboy Bebop: The Movie(2001)etc.

This story about nanotechnology, AI and some deeper existential discussions about life, death etc and is not for people who want fast action sequences and lots of shooting. There are scenes like that but very few.

Granted Aleksa Gajic is not breaking any new grounds but some of the issues he is trying to discuss here has already happened. For example there are stories about college students in USA that have been misusing medication for ADD as means to perform better at tests.

Using those types of medication in order to achieve better is very dangerous. Also you have scientist Kevin Warwick who implanted a chip in his arm so he could automatically open doors,lights etc.

These above examples serves a reminder for future viewers that some of the things featured in the film aren't that far away.

The animation is done in Flash, and it works for the most part. But sometimes I wished that Gajic had cooperated with a Japanese or a french animation studio, for a even smoother animation.

Aleksa Gajics film is very good, and I wish he gets some offers from Japan, France, USA etc because it would be nice to see some more films from him and it is not everyday you get to see well made animated sci fi films like this.

Luc Besson's Lucy had a lot of promise, conceptually, but the entire execution of the film was woefully underwhelming and wholly frustrating. It's one of those movies where at the end of it you start picking apart all of the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the plot.

It's something upon which I occasionally ponder: what would Lucy have been like had it been less a jumbled, ideologically-driven mess and more saturated and honest in its themes?

Well, you get Technotise - Edit i Ja.

(Sorry it took nearly three paragraphs to get there, but I'm there gosh darn-it!)

The animated film basically works on an almost identical concept to Lucy and the action sci-fi flick Upgrade. I don't want to give anything away for those of you who haven't seen it, but Technotise is more philosophical sci-fi rather than action sci-fi.

It has a couple of action scenes that are fairly well animated and quite engaging, but they're far and few between.

Majority of the film is about a college student name Edit that has a rather technophysio experience thanks to a formula from an autistic genius, an illegally obtained chip, and a trip through a lab being funded to scope the future.

The animated Serbian film dabbles in a lot of interesting concepts of futurism, from robotic pets and electronic pleasure clubs, to hoverboard races and cyborg DJs. It's definitely on the higher-end of the sci-fi spectrum than some fanfare out there, but at the same time a lot of the technology still seems grounded in some measure of possibility.

The real hook for the film, though, syncs up with the constantly flirting topic of cybernetic ontology... or artificial beings. The film doesn't really come down one way or another on the topic, it just presents them and then leaves the viewer to ponder them.

Unlike Lucy the film doesn't deify its lead, nor does it elevate her to hero status. Quite the contrary. Despite delving into some fascinating subject matter, Edit is never given a pedestal or portrayed as being too big to fail or too strong to fall. She's a rather realized character in a tale told both with exquisite vision and artistic originality.

Yes, the film can be rough around the edges given its limited budget but you can tell it was made with a lot of heart and passion, something missing from a lot of other bigger budget flicks produced these days.

Anyway, I could write almost all day about Technotise, but I'll simply say that much like Uma História de Amor e Fúria or Mind Game, this is definitely a film to watch if you enjoy something both visually engaging and philosophically thought-provoking.

But totally different, because it is animated. There is still graphic nudity in it, if you'll excuse the pun, but that is not what the movie is about. It's about life and the future. Future in a literal way (this plays in 2074 or something and metaphorical, as in where do we go after our visit on this planet.

The science fiction part of it, really does work, as does the thriller part of the movie. I was quite surprised to see such a greatly developed movie come out of Serbia. Seems like they are trying to get on that film map, which I consider a good thing. Always nice to have good new "players" when it comes to movies. This should be a start into an interesting new era of Serbian filmmaking one can hope.