Renaissance

Aroview: Painting a typically bleak, oppressive view of the not-to-distant future, this French animation conception realises its dystopian malaise through some unique, hard-boiled visuals carved out in the graphic novel stylings of opaque black and white.

Derivative of the same Big Brother paranoia of 1984, the film unravels the high-level conspiracy of a mysterious kidnapping and the web of intrigue spun in the wake of investigations by a detective (Daniel Craig), whose pursuit of the abductee leads to the inevitable corporate superpower pulling all the strings. Essentially a two-dimensional rendering of SIN CITY's comic book pulp (motion capture is employed here to realistically animate much of the film's movement), this is an impressive and thoroughly original spectacle with allusions to the shadowy underground of classic film noir. Alternatively though, it can be viewed as something of a soulless exercise in big screen animation, where detail and colour is so paramount to the medium's cinematic awe, and is all but lost in the film's darkened recesses.

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