SIN The Movie, produced by ADV Films is out on bilingual DVD ($24.95) and English dubbed VHS ($19.95) in the U.S. October 24th, we recently had a chance to check out an advance copy of the DVD. The SIN project is rather interesting no matter how you look at it, Houston-based ADV Films used the concept of a Dallas-based game developer - Ritual Entertainment to co-produce a Japanese animated feature with Japan-based Phoenix Entertainment. When details of the film were first released over a year ago, fan discussion on the internet and in other venues was pretty heated. Is this type of joint production the kind of thing we'll be seeing more of in the future? How will the content of the project turn out - how will it be accepted? All very interesting questions that were pondered during the viewing of SIN, we would advise everyone to draw their own independent conclusions.
The story of SIN takes place later this century, the city of Freeport is plagued by crime and corruption, in this enviroment, the crack para-military squad known as HARDCORPS is one of the last lines of defense for maintiaing order. The team's leader, Colonel John Blade is a hard-lined taciturn type, who looks out for his men. A new round of kidnappings in the city is drawing blanks with investigators and John's team is called in. The megacorp SinTEK could be involved with the crime wave, it's founder Elixis Sinclaire is ruthless, cold, and calculating, could her recent experiments be at the center of this mystery? Could the rather minor crimes be concealing something considerably more vile?
The Animation quality of SIN ranges over traditional animation cel, CGI, computer painted cel, and mixed media types. Overall quality is fair for an Anime movie and while the qulaity does take off at certain points, it's comparable most medium budgeted OVA's we've seen. Character Designs based on the Ritual games characters make a nice transition over to animation. The story is solid, fast paced, and action packed - while we did notice some elements we had seen in past horror genre anime, and a few unique to American cinema, the plot overall brings the video-game to life. Music by Masamichi Amano and the Warsaw Philharmonic is very fitting to the movie, and well composed. Japanese Voice actors used are some of the bsest in the industry, we recognized many voices from other popular anime, English voice dubbing direction is carried out very well, ADV scores points for SIN's voice work.
The SIN DVD menus are well designed - the DVD is packed with special features - 16 minutes of interviews with the American production team, the game production team at Ritual, and the American voice actors - Production Portfolio - Character Bios - Scene Selection - Trailer - ADV Previews and a very cool feature we've never seen on a DVD - 2 storylines via 2 seperate subtitle scripts! Without giving away any of the fun, both tracks are very entertaining and compliment each other quite well to enhance the total story of SIN.
SIN runs 60 minutes, our overall impression with the movie is that while there are many medium or weak qualities it is a valiant effort into some uncharted teritory that could be a mainstay of anime production for the future, the cordination of the American and Japanese production teams comes across well in this hard boiled anime thriller.
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