That was an excellent one.

It is a performances centric movie

I'll tell you why so serious

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Renaissance is a French-UK-Luxembourg motion-capture animation movie whose story revolves about Detective Karas' investigation to find a kidnapped young scientist working for the Avalon Corporation. It is Paris, year 2054.Renaissance is a detective sci-fi thriller, with a visual style strongly based on classic detective comics, film-noir and German expressionist movies. The film is very artistic, with great dynamic action scenes, and superb lighting, shadowing and texturing. The atmosphere is great, as well as the music. The recreation of Paris in the future is completely believable, as the city still looks like modern Paris, but projected and transformed according to urban development and organisation of the space that have futuristic verisimilitude. The emotional drawing of the characters is good, and it has depth, and the story is intriguing enough. What is more, it poses some interesting questions to the viewer: Is life meaningless without death? Is murder excusable if, by murdering someone, you save humanity from an uncertain future? If the answer is yes, who decides that the future is already written and a person is responsible for it? Despite everything, the movie never lifts up and, despite being a thriller, it is never thrilling enough. All the characters seem lot lack human warmth, despite the story having warmth in it, and that's the result of the poor performances of the actors lending their voices to the characters, especially Daniel Craig, who destroys Karas's character with his dull lazy dubbing. On the other hand, there are too many clichés in the story, from the cigarettes to the femme-fatale/cop affair, to the evil-good approach, while the interesting philosophical questions are never truly explored with seriousness or the challenges of the near future either. Being so, the viewer finds difficult connecting with the characters, despite enjoying the animation or being intrigued about the fate of the kidnapped girl.Renaissance is marvellous from the animation point of view, but the story struggles to grab the viewer's attention. Still has wonderful elements, and is worth watching, even if it is only for its visuals.

For what it is, Renaissance should be treasured. The images here are raw, and the color palette has been stripped down to black, white and three or four shades of gray (maximum). But even with so little, the graphics are highly effective. This picture is bold, and assertive, and it also takes high contrast lighting to the most extreme form. In this animated world, light is so strong that sometimes an individual is nothing more than a haloed silhouette with a pair of eyeballs and lips.Every image is attention grabbing, which certainly allows an open minded viewer to invest in the picture, but What works best about Renaissance is that it can be appreciated as something more than just an elaborate exercise in animation. It also achieves success as a science fiction/thriller in cyberpunk tradition. the plot is rather generic (rogue cop uncovers conspiracy is future utopia society) But this is actually a movie that requires the viewer to pay attention. It's the details that are important.Renaissance is the product of a great imagination, and has plenty to offer for anyone who approaches with an open mind.

Punctuating the opening credits sequence is a swarthy man having a strange, all-too-real nightmare. Closing in on its dystopic 2054 Paris, the film begins to follow a woman into a grungy club, where she and a Slavic bartender convene outside on the deck. They toss exclamations at each other to the effect that she owes him more money although she believes she's paid it all. Another woman obstructs the budding violence, only to have a bitter fight with the woman herself. The initial woman storms out, and she is kidnapped. Christian Volckman's Renaissance appears to be another one in an assembly line of recent motion-capture-animated sci-fi noir pictures, but in spite of whether or not that is essentially true, it tells a neatly arranged, classically unraveling detective story that keeps us in the dark in its opening minutes, even whilst introducing Karas, the hard-boiled cop we recognize from the beginning as the man awakening from a terrible dream.The rudiments of classic film noir are all hit upon without any anachronistic changes, for all intents and purposes. It is in the harshness of its monochrome that Volckman's French thriller has followed no example. For the film's animators, unfettered by the challenges of physical lighting that would normally be faced, have been able to begin with a totally black frame, and to affix utter pitch-white according to the action on screen. As they scrupulously imitate the effects of real light sources throughout the frame, the distinction of black and white here is full-blown without even any of the slightest shades of gray to tone with the characters' less starkly definite moral codes, and the outcome is a harsh and judgmental vision of the direction in which commercial civilization is going, sporadically caused to undergo the most blaring and ruthless of illumination. It is the artistic study of film noir taken to their visual boundary of its philosophy, and nothing before has ever shared quite the same execution of this visual concept.All the characters in this decent cyberpunk film seem as if to have been walk off with purely from a Gothic comic book in black ink, but all together their physical responses, their motions and the nuances of their facial expressions look ashore within a clear humanity. Normally, films that try out new developments in animation allow their technical advances upstage all other facets of production. Sin City, for example, left substance and overall good screen adaptation from its source material to be desired.It may not be mind-blowing, it may have its narrative conventions and its voice-over cast may simply be adequate, but Renaissance, made for $19 million over six years, not only feels like actual noir instead of a rashly penned appropriation, but also is not secondary to all the visual innovation, which is played as if to be incidental. One leaves thinking not so much about how cool it is when Karas is evading bullets shot through a crowded glass Parisian street, but more about its ponderance of life and death, how life's tragedies, such as death, make life meaningful.

2054. Paris is an Escher drawing with people and vehicles scurrying along at multiple levels in an obvious homage to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Paris is both ultramodern and crumbling into decay. And in the blink between surveillance sweeps, a pretty young medical researcher is kidnapped just after leaving her sister in a seedy nightclub. A tough police captain investigates. Shown in stark black and white, with the gloomy corridors, shadowy alleys and single source lighting characteristic of the most hard-boiled of film noir, comparisons to Sin City are inevitable. But the story owes more to Masamune Shirow and William Gibson than to Frank Miller, as high tech surveillance, near-invisible stealth suits and ruthless super-corporations are as much a part of the landscape as guns and cars. The film never quite generates the doom-laden atmosphere of Gibson's cyberpunk vision, with its tech-heavy marginal characters clashing with industrial types from corporations that all seem to have their own Ministry of Fear, but the viewer definitely gets the sense that future Paris is no Utopia and future science is less than benevolent. And as the police procedural plot line unfolds we are taken into the darker recesses of individual ambition beneath the shiny veneer of Avalon corporation's cultivated PR image. The motion capture process used here produces a look somewhere between B&W comic books and next generation rotoscoping, and is either captivating or intrusive depending on your tastes. Nevertheless, a great visual sense is on display here, and future Paris is filled in down to the tiny details giving the picture a unique look which is in turns both spartan and baroque. Worth a look.