The kind of terrible anime that gets approval at Hot Topic. Avoid for anything with real substance.

While the storyline leaves a bit to be desired, the animation quality and atmosphere is the highest I have ever seen of any anime, period. This alone makes it a must-see for anyone even remotely interested in the genre; I have even shown this movie to people who "hate anime" and has on more than one occasion swayed their opinion.

Gorgeously animated but a bit slow. I wish someone would disabuse the Japanese of the notion that elementary philosophy, facile political insight and dodgy spiritualism constitute substance.

Surprisingly not fun. A lot of pseudo-religious symbolism and faux-existentialism wrapped in a shiny, pretty sci-fi/action veneer, it screams potential but fails to deliver because it all seems derivative. Disappointing, although the animation itself makes the plot easy to swallow.

A utopian society starts cracking.

Cool remake of the 1988 original.

A very forgettable film, aside from the CG animation. The interaction between the two main characters is "meh" at best and it's just hard to care. It doesn't help that I've seen the futuristic utopia storyline done MUCH better in stuff like Ergo Proxy and Texhnolyze.

Very visually pleasing.

For all the twists & turns Appleseed's overly convoluted plot takes to make its point about the violent nature of man, in the end it all just feels like set-up for that ever-popular Anime trope: giant freakin robots smashing things. The film succeeds in this department, largely because of some gorgeous animation, but getting there is a slog that is not helped in the least by dialogue so stale even George Lucas would groan hearing it. Or the dub might have just been awful; that tends to happen...

"The film let's us know early on that its cyberdrama will be served cold." - Ed Gonzalez

boring, but at least it looked cool.

Most of this 87 comes from the animation, which is awesome, and is probably not as technically advanced as the new Pixar stuff (see, Cars), but it's much more stylized and is gorgeous. Plot is somewhat iffy but it ends with 1 woman taking down a giant robot. A fairly common Japanese gimmick but for others it should be pretty entertaining.

Stunning animation combined with computer graphics give this a polish that few movies can touch. The actual story is rather well telegraphed, the main twist is pretty easy to guess, but no one watches anime for (much) intellectual stimuli. Akira is the exception.