Hironobu Sakaguchi

The year is 2065, and, following an alien invasion, humankind is shored up in orbiting spaceships and a few safe zones on Earth’s surface. Dr Aki Ross, the film’s heroine, makes an illicit visit to New York, a post-apocalyptic skeleton of a city, to pick her way through the devastation in search of signs of life.

“In the wake of the tragedy of September 11, what I wanted to say generally with the movie is more potent,” says director Hironobu Sakaguchi. “The central idea is that a universal, constantly fluctuating balance exists between harmony and violence. That has been the case throughout history, and there’s no real right or wrong to it. But when the balance is lost, that is when wars can start. And after the terrible events in New York, the message rings especially true.

“I feel that there is an imbalance now, especially in Japan, caused by the information people are fed by the media. People are choosing to believe it rather than think for themselves.

“But I meant to send a very general message. People experience terrible losses on a daily basis, and have to find ways to go on. I wanted to offer hope, that lost spirits do somehow go on. The image of the hawk soaring above cliffs which both opens and closes the movie, inspired by a stunning trip I took through the Grand Canyon in a small airplane, symbolises that.”

A personal loss which deeply affected Sakaguchi was the death of his mother in 1990 (?*). The director, then leading the development department of Japanese games company Square Co. Ltd. and creating his own Final Fantasy video game series, sought to integrate his loss by exploring different philosophical and spiritual world views. Ultimately, it was this search which inspired the movie.

“I have since found peace with my mother’s passing, but that event certainly sent me on a journey, and I meditated for a long time on its meaning,” Sakaguchi says. “I don’t consider myself to belong to any one view, but I became very interested in the way in which, at the cutting edge, science is crossing over with metaphysics. That’s where the idea for the story originated.”

The movie’s central mystery is the existence – or not – of a spiritual life force, running through the Earth and all its creatures. While the authorities seek to pulverise their invaders – an eye-popping array of insect, dragon, and reptile-like spectral monsters – with more and more firepower, a renegade band led by two scientists pursue an alternative, holistic solution, seeking to immunise the beleaguered planet by discovering and replenishing its spirit, whose name, Gaia, is borrowed both from Greek mythology – she is the mother of the Earth – and from new age beliefs about the Earth’s life force.

“It’s not a religious idea, but we are looking at a spiritual force,” Sakaguchi elaborates. “There is a conflict in the movie between people who see the energy as just that, and those who see the energy as a spirit.”

Sakaguchi’s philosophical bent is familiar to players of the Final Fantasy games, where it has become a distinctive feature, and dictates a relatively sensitive policy on violence.

“If you consider people dying as violence, then there are parts where that would happen,” says Sakaguchi. “But if someone dies, it has to do with the story. It’s not just people dying all over the place.”

Of course first and foremost The Spirits Within is a hi-tech exposition of a good old-fashioned action yarn, and it is in The Spirits Within’s shoot-’em-up, game-style action sequences that it scores its most spectacular triumphs and most effectively blurs the boundaries between animation and realism. In the 20 years since video gaming emerged, it has become a $20 million a year industry, and has had a massive impact on the structure and visual style of blockbuster movies. Notes The Spirits Within’s producer Chris Lee, “We owe much of the uncoventional storytelling of films like The Matrix and The Mummy to video games as we do conventional moviemaking.”

A CGI crossover epic from a games maker was always inevitable, and having from 1986 developed the Final Fantasy series into one of the best-selling games series ever, racking up a very useful 33 million units, Sakaguchi was a prime contender to fuse the two genres. To do so, he based his production in Hawaii, making Square’s Honolulu HQ temporary home to over 200 artists and technicians from 20 countries. The unprecedented process took four and a half years, cost $137 million, and, laughs Sakaguchi, a few grey hairs.

“I only truly knew it was going to happen about six months before the premiere!”

But Sakaguchi’s real goal for the project was to take the technology somewhere new, somewhere emotional. “I want to tell a story. The characters are like real people, crying and laughing, and that drives my interest in dramatic presentation and visuals. In the end, I want to merge this with games. I want to make a game so good that if I taped it and showed it to someone, that person will feel moved.”

Still, despite the realisation of Dr Ross – individually created hair follicles and all, being so convincing that US Maxim magazine named her one of the world’s 50 sexiest women, Sakaguchi knows the new genre requires constant pushing.

“First we must perfect the process. There are still many hurdles in the production of CG.”

The single most harrowing of which is cost. Recoupment of the movie’s hefty production budget barely began with a worldwide box office take of $61 million. Reports have appeared in the American press that Square Co. Ltd. has scrapped any future movie-making plans, although Sakaguchi is currently talking to movie studios about co-creating new feature films using the cutting edge movie-making know-how Square now possesses, and production rolls on apace on the next instalment in the Final Fantasy games series.

“Certainly the box office failed,” says Sakaguchi, “which was a big disappointment. But we have high hopes for a longer life for The Spirits Within on DVD, a medium to which it is clearly well-suited. One of the responses I have had to the film which has surprised me a great deal is that people find the storyline confusing. I should be delighted if they would buy the DVD and watch it over and over again!”

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is released on DVD on 21st January 2002 for £24.99.