Review for Technotise: Edit & I

Introduction

I really have to do something about that Pavlov reflex of mine, although in this case the trigger and the food are the same thing, anime. I see the word anime written in PR blurb and I’ll have done crafting the e-mail requesting the check disc before I can even think about it. Sometimes I can put the brakes on long enough to actually read further, to find out if what I’m requesting is actually worthwhile, but this time the temptation was compounded by the qualifier ‘cyberpunk’. My first anime was Akira! I have no resistance to that combination. Which is why I am now reviewing my first Serbian cyberpunk anime, Technotise: Edit and I. It turns out that this is something of a labour of love for its creator, comic book author Aleksa Gajić, following a similar sort of route as Makoto Shinkai’s earlier films. Technotise is a low budget production that took some 5 years to complete with Aleksa Gajić writing, directing, and producing the adaptation of his own graphic novel.


In Belgrade 2074, Edit Stefanovich is a girl with problems, nagging parents, deadbeat boyfriend, and she keeps failing her exams, not helped by a perverted teacher. On the bright side, at least she has a fulfilling job at the TDR corporation, trying to help an autistic boy connect with the world. A piece of illicit tech from a drug-dealer might help with her exams though, a stolen military chip that will enhance her memory. The problems begin when she learns what TDR is really about, and it isn’t about care of the dysfunctional. It’s actually into top secret research, and seeing that research in person has an unexpected impact on the implanted chip. Now she’s suddenly developed a craving for iron, and a distinct second personality that can control her body at will. TDR see the fruits of their research ripening in Edit’s body, and they want it back, over her dead body if necessary.

Picture

It’s not anime, it’s nothing like anime. Stupid Pavlov reflex! That said, Technotise is a pretty decent looking animation, although it does look more like Flash animation at times. Certainly the character designs and movement have a computer generated feel to them, and lack the energetic, hand drawn feel that even the most CG anime still has these days. But the character designs are accomplished and distinctive, the world design is appealing and consistent, while the imagination put into creating this future world of holograms, hoverboards, and robots really does tell on screen. The image is clear and sharp throughout on this 1.85:1 anamorphic PAL transfer, although the usual niggle of digital banding is apparent.

Sound

The film gets a DD 2.0 Serbian stereo audio track with English subtitles burnt into the print. And here is where the problems begin. For one thing, there is a flaw in the audio in that if you listen to it on Dolby Surround kit, for the first 21 minutes the dialogue will come through all speakers, making the film sound hollow. At that point the dialogue switches solely to the centre speaker where it belongs, and remains there for the rest of the runtime. Once that happens, the film comes up with some nice separation for its action sequences, and the impressive techno music soundtrack. The more pressing issue is the quality of the subtitles, which technically are poor, with two people’s dialogue often appearing on the same line, or one person’s dialogue split clumsily down the middle in two subsequent captions. There’s one scene where a TV show one of the characters is watching has its Spanish dialogue subtitled on screen in Serbian, and the English subtitles translating that are overlaid on top, making both subtitle captions illegible. But by far the worst flaw is the translation, which comes across more as transliteration, questionable syntax, difficult to read, incomprehensible colloquialisms. These are subtitles seemingly written by someone for whom English is not a main language, and make fathoming the details of the story difficult. They look like they lifted the English captions from the Youtube stream of the movie and just encoded them onto the disc.

Extras

The disc presents its content with an animated menu screen.

Conclusion

Technotise: Edit and I has a decent, if somewhat familiar cyberpunk story to it. But having a grounding in films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix trilogy makes originality in the genre somewhat harder to find. So a tale about a girl that gets an illegal microchip implant to cheat on her exams isn’t exactly groundbreaking. The complication that arises when interacting with some secret corporate research causes that implant to mutate, and for a second discrete personality to arise in her, raising questions of identity and intelligence; again this is nothing new for cyberpunk. That the second personality can take control of her body, and indulge in egregious, gravity defying, and bullet-time inducing kung-fu means that the film is never short for action.


The question is if Technotise: Edit and I does enough to stand out in its own right, and I have to say that the film certainly does make an impact. Its vision of a future world is distinct and believable, blending future technology into a society that is little changed from our own. The animation is variable. The character design aesthetic certainly is cheap and cheerful, and the regular animation is similarly underwhelming, with some conversation scenes looking almost like the paper puppet animations from my childhood, like Ivor the Engine. But then along comes an action sequence, where Edit unleashes some of her kung-fu, or we have a high velocity hoverboard race, and the animation suddenly looks fantastic. One particular annoyance might be that having decided to have a good looking female protagonist, a decision was made to show her naked as often as possible, even in scenes which have nothing to do with the story. There’s a pointless shower scene that is little more than eye-candy.


As a sci-fi thriller though, the film moves along at a good pace, developing its story well, heading in a fairly predictable direction, even with its twists and turns. The supporting characters are really just there to move the story along, and get very little development though, so there’s a tendency to see them as just obnoxious jerks that serve as impediments in Edit’s life, people to argue with. While there is a sense of peril for the character, there’s no real antagonist to balance the narrative, just a corporate entity that’s more a force of nature. The ‘evil’ professor whose pet project this all is comes across as a kindly old grandfather type, lacking any malice or ambition. One annoyance I found was the way that the characters related to each other, just insults and obnoxiousness rather than in any way that grew them as characters, although that might be down to cultural idiosyncrasies of the Serbian audience.


Generally Technotise: Edit and I was an enjoyable film, but this time it was let down by its presentation, an audio flub in the first twenty minutes of the film is forgivable, but a subtitle translation that is difficult to read at the best of times, downright illegible at the worst makes the viewing experience much more of a challenge than it should be. This is one film that really could have done with an English dub.