• Listen to Ed Catmull discuss managing creativity.
• Pixar’s Collective Genius – Harvard Business Review Magazine
• How Pixar fosters Collective Creativity

Special Thanks to FXPHD for first mentioning Ed’s Siggraph 2008 speach, with topics discussed in this article and associated media options.

Basically, a scientist, Azuma’s own robot creations are brought to life by a freakish, hard to understand lightning bolt, and their only mission is to eliminate the human race. Luckily, Azuma’s son is reborn with neo-cells that allow the reincarnated bionic hero, Casshern fight robots and ultimately redem his race of humans or neo-cell humans. I’m glad I enjoy visual effects because the story has clear signs of genre predictability.

I’m shocked that I ever saw this movie, after being shown the trailer by a colleague in Bowling Green’s cave lab in 2004 I have been interested in seeing this movie for a while. I wasn’t 100% positive of the Title’s spelling, I just knew a Korean director had produced it, and I immediately recognized it was I accidently stumbled upon it at Blockbuster. The trailer spoiled an insane fight between the story’s heros and robotic machines meant to control those

I watched this movie with a lot of high expectations and I was only partially disappointed. Yeah it was action packed and it had tons of 3d, visual fx and killer robots, not bad for a 2004 film.

While some concepts and themes facing the characters were interesting and relavant to current events, the stories lack of editing continuity and rapid cuts to flashbacks made the story not this film’s best strength. The inclusion of too many underlying issues made this director’s first film appearance and heavily processed visual style the best elements. The rich saturated color palette was often juxtaposed with cold desaturated flash back war sequences and the processing was similar to Captain and the world of tomorrow, 300, sin city, but much more abstracted and saturated colors.

Website : www.casshern.com

Rating: 3 Stars for this DVD (1-4 Star range). (For the vfx faint of heart)

Pros : I finally saw this movie, after thinking I never would have.

Cons : Great Trailer, actual story could have been enhanced with a little less predictability. The DVD was lacking the behind the scenes, director commentary, assorted xtras.

Visit the official site @ www.sonypictures.com/mirrormask

5 STARS!
This movie was a great blend of live action and cg magic that was driven by a unique characters and surreal concepts and imaginary worlds. The most memorable part of this movie was the hand drawn style of all of the cg shots and the excellent compositing and beautiful lighting. While watching the special features I was impressed by the small CG team of 15 members that handled all of the shots with cg elements.

I highly recommend seeing this movie if you enjoy an original and surreal story.