Final Fantasy · Feature Film · 2001 · Square Pictures / Columbia Pictures
Hironobu Sakaguchi spent four years and $137 million building photorealistic humans out of pixels. The film lost around $94 million, destroyed Square Pictures, and nearly took Square with it.
The Spirits Within was directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi — the creator of Final Fantasy itself — and released in the United States on 11 July 2001, after a four-year effort. It was the first feature film to attempt fully photorealistic computer-generated human characters, a technical ambition so far ahead of the industry that Square built an entire studio, Square Pictures, largely in order to attempt it. The production cost reached $137 million. It grossed $85.1 million. The net loss is generally estimated at around $94 million, and higher when marketing is included, making it one of the largest box-office disasters on record. The consequences for Square were severe and immediate: instead of an anticipated $6 million profit, the company posted an annual loss of $84 million, attributed overwhelmingly to the film. Square Pictures was shut down. The financial damage is widely regarded as a contributing factor in the events that led to Square's merger with Enix in 2003. The film also bears almost no relationship to the games whose name it carries — no crystals, no chocobos, no recognisable Final Fantasy iconography — which left it in the worst possible position: too strange for a general audience, and insufficiently Final Fantasy for the audience that came because of the title.
The most expensive lesson in the uncanny valley ever purchased
The Spirits Within's central technical achievement is also its central problem. Its human characters are astonishingly detailed — individually rendered hair, skin that responds to light, faces built to a fidelity nothing had previously approached — and they are, to most viewers, subtly and persistently wrong. They move like people and do not quite live like them, and the closer the film gets to photorealism, the more insistently the remaining gap announces itself.
This is the uncanny valley, and in 2001 the industry did not really have a vocabulary for it. Square's bet was that the gap was a technical problem which sufficient money and time could close. What the film demonstrated, at a cost of $137 million, is that the gap does not close smoothly — that approaching realism can make an image less convincing rather than more, and that the animation studios which had prospered by stylising rather than replicating human beings had been right all along.
The decision to call the film Final Fantasy while including essentially nothing from Final Fantasy has been picked over for two decades, and it remains difficult to defend. The series had, by 2001, an enormously valuable set of recognisable elements — crystals, summons, chocobos, a particular register of operatic melodrama — and the film uses none of them, presenting instead a sombre science-fiction story about phantoms and Gaia theory.
The result was a film with no natural audience. General cinemagoers had no reason to see it; Final Fantasy players who did turned up expecting something they did not get. Sakaguchi's ambition was to prove that the name could mean something broader than a game series, and it did prove something — that a brand can be spent, and that spending it on a project the brand's audience does not recognise is an expensive way to find out.