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Dr. Aki Ross (voice of Ming-Na) is the virtual star of
FInal Fantasy: The Spirits Within.
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Our first contact with Final Fantasy scientist Dr. Aki Ross (voice of Ming-Na) is an extreme close-up of her left eye. Her long eyelashes flutter beneath an arching eyebrow. Her gaze is warm and caring.
You can tell a lot about people from the look of their eyes. The same thing holds true for a virtual character like Aki, whose computer-animated eyes are the beginning of an extraordinary story.
In the battle of virtual icons, Aki is a welcome breath of humanity next to someone like Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. Aki is pretty, but she's a futuristic girl-next-door compared to Croft's Playboy curves.
As the heroine of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, an animated feature based on the popular Final Fantasy video game series, Aki shares a common origin with Nintendo's mustachioed plumber Mario and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog.
Aki seems so real, it's difficult to think of her as just a videogame cartoon character. She looks more human than digitized electronics. She's the consummate joystick actress.
In Final Fantasy, Aki leads an ensemble of computer-animated characters who all share her lifelike appearance. A muscle-bound soldier (voice of Alec Baldwin) and an elderly scientist (voice of Donald Sutherland) help her rid a future Earth of alien monsters.
Ming-Na's girlish tone helps create Aki's lively personality. Still, it's not the voice that ultimately brings Aki to life. That task has already been accomplished by Final Fantasy's computer animators.
In a set of adjacent rooms inside a Los Angeles hotel, it's possible to plot Aki's incredible development as a virtual icon. Final Fantasy's animators are on hand, showing sketches, digital images and wire-frame designs of her body.
In the movie, Aki appears to be a real woman, but Final Fantasy's animators confirm that her origin is based on geometry and computer coding. The hype surrounding Aki is due to the fact that she's so hyper-real.
True to its video game past, Final Fantasy offers plenty of explosions. Its version of the future is one where you must watch your every step.
"We blow up things," says an exuberant Remo Balcells, Final Fantasy's visual effects supervisor. "And we have a lot of fun doing that."
Balcells led a team of animators in making debris and dust. Much of their time and effort went toward creating an explosion inside a crater.
Balcells says he's very happy with the stylized look of the explosion, an appropriately loud finale to a teen-friendly movie adventure. But the explosions throughout Final Fantasy pale when compared to the intricate detail involved in creating Aki's shoulder-length hair.
Sixty-thousand brown strands comprise Aki's hair, and each of them is designed with their own physical properties. The result is that her hair moves like it's real. Every flip of her head pushes Aki further and further away from the realm of the two-dimensional cartoon.
"Believe me, it was a lot of work to keep them (hair) all moving," character animator Roy Sato says.
The process for making Aki goes back a couple of years. Video footage was shot of Ming-Na recording her dialogue. Afterwards, Sato would watch the videotape to determine the shape of Aki's mouth. For Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy video games and the director of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it was important that it looked as if Aki was speaking Ming-Na's words. The goal was perfect mimicry.
There are 150 computer controls to allow Sato to adjust Aki's various movements. He can shift her eyes, control the size of her pupils. Her nostrils flare on command. Sato manipulates each finger and knuckle, allowing Aki to quickly make a fist. In his hands, a computer screen becomes the equivalent of an artist's sketch book.
It was important for Sato that Aki didn't possess the flawless complexion of a porcelain doll, so freckles, pimples and moles can be found across Aki's face. Her lips have a fleshy texture. You can make out the tear drops inside her blinking eyes.
"Physically, these characters are a bit like real people," Sato says. "Aki's just like a virtual puppet."
On a bulletin board adjacent to Sato's computer, Aki's bio is listed in matter-of-fact style. Her birth date is Oct. 7, 2038. By the film's perspective, Aki is 27. San Francisco is her birthplace. Her specialty is biotechnology. It's as if someone were describing a real person.
Later in the day, at the same hotel, Ming-Na shares her enthusiasm for the film's artistic vision.
"This movie is the first of its kind," she says. "It's the first to reach the top of the mountain."
It doesn't even bother Ming-Na that Aki looks nothing like her. She's too impressed by the film's visual imagery to care.
"It's magical to me," she says. "I don't know how they (the animators) did their jobs."
Watching Final Fantasy, seeing Aki battle the alien monsters on-screen, it's still difficult to accept her as anything more than a figment of fantasy. Aki might be anatomically correct, but the film's sci-fi setting makes a sobering impact.
Don't let the freckles fool you -- Aki is a make-believe girl living in a make-believe world.
Aki follows in the tradition of humanlike characters in anime adventures like Ghost in the Shell. She has an attractive personality similar to Kyoko Date, the virtual celebrity based on an average teen-age Japanese girl. Like the virtual singer in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, Aki also possesses human abilities and sensations.
By comparison, the robot boy David in Steven Spielberg's sci-fi drama Artificial Intelligence is clumsy and stiff.
"I'm relieved that they only got so close," Sutherland says. "It was as if there were actors playing dolls. But there was a life to them. There was a virtual life."
Unlike Lara Croft's flesh-and-blood transformation into Angelina Jolie for Tomb Raider, Aki has no intentions of entering the real world. By taking advantage of the current video game mania, Aki will remain a virtual idol.
So far, the hype surrounding Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within appears to be working. Aki is the only virtual person to grace the pages of Entertainment Weekly's annual "It" list. Flashing her bare midriff in a black leather jumpsuit, Aki is described as "the most sophisticated animated actress ever unleashed on-screen."
For a cartoon character, it's an impressive start to a film career. ©
