A Future Without Contrast Knobs

Motion-capture, Rotoscoping, and other mind-bending blends of animated and physical reality may be here to stay, but let "Renaissance" be a cautionary lesson.This severe black-and-white animation, a French import revoiced for Miramax, resembles nothing so much as a photographic negative, or, for viewers of a certain age, the indistinct mass of old scrambled cable stations.

"Renaissance" takes the sharp contrast of film noir and turns the knob all the way down. Human figures are rendered in varieties of outlined silhouette, perpetually backlit. Every face is a halfmoon chiaroscuro. Except for panoramas of the futuristic Parisian settings, everything and everyone threatens to sink into background ink.

The result looks sleek and stunning in stills, producing ready-made revolutionary poster art or full-page comic-book composites, but these etched, minimalist compositions fail when set in motion. As gunmen dash through the rain or speeding cars careen about, the vertiginous effect produces nausea, not excitement. Static scenes are more manageable, once you have your sea legs.

But this "Renaissance," even with the reliably sexy premise of retailed immortality, is enacted with a script patched together from generic cop movies. Other recent animation experiments have matched theme to form: the expressionism of "Sin City" with its base urges, the squiggly vision of "A Scanner Darkly" with its drug paranoia. Devoid of mood or attitude, this detective story is repetitive, the rigid-faced characters lost in the hailstorm of sleekness.

In the labyrinthine Paris of 2054, an Orwellian megacorporation called Avalon sells eternal youth and beauty. When Ilona (Romola Garai), an Avalon researcher, is kidnapped, Karas (voiced and, I guess one should add, motioned by Daniel Craig) is assigned to track her down. The world he inhabits is recognizably Parisian, as an early pull-back panorama (a rip-off of "Blade Runner") shows: Massive, stacked buildings consist of rounded elegant facades lining today's boulevards, and the highway and subway systems have been sensibly routed under glass (quel style!).

These shots sometimes resemble neat, wishful architectural sketches; indeed, the implications of the urban planning are more captivating than the plot.

While the headstrong Ilona is imprisoned in an eerie holographic forest (a nice touch for a futuristic nightmare), her fiery yet sensitive sister, Bislane (Catherine McCormack), becomes Karas's love interest during the course of the hunt. The powerful 3-D facsimile capabilities of motion-capture are proven through cornball getting-to-know-you scenes that faithfully replicate clichés of the tough cop with hidden vulnerabilities.

Karas dashes about the city, repeatedly "learning" the same thing from suspects (Avalon has nefarious plans concerning eternal life) and engaging in conveniently spectacular fights. He hunts someone in a glassed-in backyard forest and confronts the head of Avalon (Jonathan Pryce) in a glassed-in office on a bridge suspended over the city. He receives direction from his superior back at the "Minority Report"-like headquarters, a woman who screams every latest tip like a recurring headset voice in a video game.

Delivering this dialogue seems a thankless job for the "actors," and the stiffness that persistently crops up suggests motion-capture is something closer to full-body puppetry. Faces are the main problem; Karas and company are so masked in shadow that they have a limited range of expression. As for bodies, an early, ill-advised scene in a club zooms in on one roof-raiser who looks like Gumby doing the robot. The all-contrast design also has the disquieting effect of making the occasional hologram human appear more shapely and inhabited than real flesh-and-blood characters. (The animators seem particularly aware of this when lingering on one streetwalker hologram in a red-light district.) The aesthetic of "Renaissance" would likely be more bearable in moderate doses.

It might not mean much to say that the movie's villains are cartoonish (Mr. Pryce's Avalon CEO is a suited cackler on a vidscreen), but it would matter less with a gripping story. Sadly, the filmmakers treat as self-evidently fresh those dystopian standbys: superhuman aspirations (eternal life) and political cataclysm (Avalon's corporate totalitarianism, much implied but little explained). There's more futuristic intrigue in a 15-year-old snippet of the dialogue-free "Aeon Flux" cartoon.

Maintaining today's multicultural Paris, "Renaissance" also has the strange habit of rendering its non-white characters a little monstrous, noticeable only because of the consistent austerity of the others. The perfect duotone divide of the heroes' faces goes out the window for an Arab kingpin whom Karas visits in his mistress-laden Roman bath; he looks and grunts a little like Jabba the Hut's Slimfasting cousin. One hit man looks like a Star Trek Ferengi (and flings himself like a beast against interrogation-room walls), and a Japanese gerontologist is a pair of glasses perched on a rising mountain of wrinkly throat.

The minds behind "Renaissance," who worked years on the project, claim original inspiration from a 3-D still by a whizkid animator, which fits. And perhaps the fusion of motion-capture and this adventuresome aesthetic is at a stage analogous to Robbie the Robot versus a replicant. Like an action movie directed by stuntmen, "Renaissance" has its wowser set piece moments, but it is not the first fanatic piece of craft that has wound up seeming hollow.