Technotise: Edit & I

I've been a Japanese-anime collector for years, this was quite a surprise. Funny how things go, I found a link to the YouTube in a David Brin article, and didn't know quite what to expect.

One full-length movie later, it's just ... WOW.

Futuristic story, great character design, animation quality with attention to foreground and background, interesting plot with action, adventure, relationships, philosophy and more. Glad there were subtitles.

Made me want to go back to Belgrade (was there in 1970) and shake the creator's hand. The work of one person ... amazing. That's why it's definitely a 10.

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.

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."

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.