Technotise: Edit & I

This is an emotional drama about life, love, friendship, parenting, symbiosis, sacrifice, and death. It has action, it has bonds between friends, it has some little gags poking fun at family life in general. It tries to show that we're all human, there are no true "villains" just people who think they are right too often, and it subtly questions what it means to be "human" and to be "alive."

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.

This was pretty interesting just for the fact that it's Serbian cyberpunk!

In 2074, Belgrade. Edit is a really smart but bored young woman who is so bored by her classes she's finding it difficult to pass some really important exams. She's also living a student life with her mom, who resents her, and her father who seems pretty out of it all the time.

She also spends her days with an autistic man as her job. When she's not doing that, she's hanging out with her friends. One of the things I didn't like about it was that as with a lot of anime, it over sexualizes Edit incredibly. Basically everyone does, including the autistic kid, her boyfriend, her friends, the scientist. It really detracts from the story, for me.

After the film sufficiently shows edit is a victim of the system, who never feels satisfied with her purpose in life and her boyfriend just wants to have sex all the time - it starts to pickup where she gets her hands on some illegal tech that will allow her to have perfect recall of things she sees and therefor, reads. It's her hope that with this tech she can pass her exams with flying colours.

This is where things get interesting, it starts exploring bio-punk tech concepts with the idea that this chip begins to feed off of her in a sort of symbiotic relationship with one another. This culminates in her having an AI presence from the tech bonded within her. She begins to learn more of herself by interacting with this construct and her life also goes careening into a ditch.

There's subsequent action that was pretty cool. The animation was really unique and cool. The language was very neat, I'd never heard Serbian before and it's a pretty cool language!

The exploration of what such tech could do to us with the possible ramifications were really interesting. There was some interesting eastern philosophy brought into it and the context was good. I liked Edit as a character, I liked most things except the over sexualization that was pretty overt. I ended up rating it a 7. 

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.