Bruce Von Stiers

In their video and DVD releases, ADV Films usually provides trailers of some of their other films. I has seen the trailer for one film several times and decided to take a look at it. It seemed to be about weapons, machinery and mayhem. Just what you would want in an animated adventure. What I found was a film with great graphics, good music and a really different storyline. The title of the film was Spriggan. I watched a DVD copy of the film.

Spriggan was described by one of my fellow reviewers as “Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Rambo.” I wouldn’t go that far. The storyline does involve a biblical presence, Noah’s Ark, but you never get the feel of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones from any of the characters. You do, however, get a high body count by the end of the film. So that probably makes it closer to Rambo than Indiana Jones.

The film opens up with a jungle scene. A man is trying to evade a military unit. He gets away after shooting it out with a few people. Then we flash to a classroom scene. It seems the guy we were just watching is a high school student. But who is this guy, Yu Ominae? One of the other students is acting weird and Yu follows him up to the roof of the school. The boy rips open his shirt to reveal explosives and a message that says “Noah will be your grave.” The boy blows himself up. From that you will almost certainly know that Yu will investigate things to find out what drove his fellow student to take his own life like that.

Yu’s investigation takes him to Turkey, to Mount Ararat. But before he gets there, Yu has to battle it out with some bad guys. It seems that they don’t want him to get to his destination. But get there he does and finds out something intriguing. People have discovered the true Noah’s Ark. A research team led by Dr. Meisel and a woman named Margaret are investigating the ark and trying to get inside it.

There are several stereotypes in the film. Dr. Meisel and Margaret are but two of them. Why is it in these animated productions that the lead scientist almost always looks like an Albert Einstein clone? The same for Margaret. There is normally a good looking woman working at a lab or research facility in these films.

The reason that Yu is checking things out is that he is an agent for some super secret agency called ARCAM. This group keeps the world at large from finding about ancient and recent supernatural secrets. The top agents for ARCAM are called Spriggans. Yu is a Spriggan and that is why he ends up at the research facility with Margaret and Dr. Meisel.

After reaching the research site, Yu has to defend it from invading forces. These forces are led by a young boy named McDougal. He has some extreme kinetic powers and uses them to try to take over. There are cyborgs fighting on the invading forces that are really interesting. There is Fattman and Little Boy and a host of other nasty cyborg soldiers trying to gain access to the facility. Yu takes on these forces in a high tech armor suit. Also along for the ride is another Spriggan named Jean-Jacques Mond. He takes up the slack when Yu is occupied.

There is some really good CG animation techniques used in the film. The film is a little grainy but doesn’t detract from the viewing at all. It was directed by Hirotsugu Kawasaki, who was once the protégé of Katsuhiro Otomo, the force behind Akira. One of the things that I liked best was the background scenes. They were well drawn and depicted the area surrounding the characters in great detail.

The DVD has some nice extras. There are Key Backgrounds, which are line art drawings of some of the locations in the film. There are also line drawings of vehicles and weapons. Character Designs is a third section of line art, this one being on the characters in the film. There is also an audio commentary from the ADR Director, Matt Greenfield. Matt explains some of the nuances of the film while giving almost blow by blow accounting of how the film was done.

The film had the vocal talents of Christopher Patton as Yu and Ted Pfister as Dr. Meisel. There was Kelly Manison as Margaret and Andy McAvin as Jean-Jacque. One surprise for Kevin Corn, who did the voice of McDougal. He could sound so childlike and yet chilling all in the same sentence.

Spriggan was an all right film. It had a preposterous plot (what film doesn’t these days?) and characters that don’t really get developed. It would have been nice to find out how a high school aged guy like Yu became a Spriggan. And just where did ARCAM come from, anyway? But the action and great graphics made up for the inconsistencies in the story.

You should be able to find Spriggan on the retail shelves. It was released in 2001, so it should still be around. To check out further information on Spriggan, or to order it online, visit the ADV Films web site. It can be found at www.advfilms.com.