Last Monday, I had a chance to catch Vexille at the AFI Dallas Film Festival. It was everything I had hoped for in a CG action film and more. Now, I could be the one to tell you why you should watch it, but I’ve got something even better. Thanks to the folks at FUNimation, I had a chance to speak with Vexille’s director, SORI, so I’ll let him be the one to sell you on it instead!

SPWUG: It sounds like you do movies that cover a lot of different subjects — fantasy, science fiction, sports, mystery — what kind of genre do you prefer?

SORI: I love entertainment, so I don’t really restrict myself in genre. I do like anything entertaining. I like action. I like emotional stories. I like to mix action and story — not just action-driven films, and not just story, but both together.

SPWUG: So was that your reason behind creating Vexille?

SORI: I wanted to make it a mixture of film as an entertaining commodity and a commercial commodity, and also at the same time an art form. I wanted to make something that combined these elements so that it is not just a commercial success, but so that it is also an art form.

In Japan, animation is received very differently by different people and it is very difficult for animation fans in Japan to understand and appreciate the art form of films — they prefer the commercial aspects of animation over art. So it’s sort of a different take in terms of this film.

SPWUG: I noticed something… you used a lot of butterflies in Vexille. I think I know what it is supposed to symbolize, but I wanted to hear from you what the symbol of the butterfly meant throughout the movie.

SORI: Freedom. It is the symbol of freedom.

SPWUG: Ah. Okay… I guessed wrong.

SORI: (laughs) The butterfly was in Ping Pong as well, and it is also symbolized in Ichi.

SPWUG: Does the butterfly symbolize yourself as well then?

SORI: It’s not that I particularly like butterflies, but I think that something in me has the dream of flying out and to be free.

SPWUG: So you express this freedom through your filmmaking?

SORI: The reason why I wanted to participate in the entertainment industry is because people are tied down with a lot of stuff. They go to get entertainment to escape from those everyday things that tie them down, so I believe that a part of me involved in the entertainment industry is also symbolized by the butterfly through entertaining — and that a part of me is expressing this freedom in the entertainment that I create.

SPWUG: Do you have any plans on what your next project will be yet?

SORI: Ah (laughs), well, I haven’t told this to anybody yet, so you’re new, the first to hear this… I’m looking at doing another live-action film. In Japan, scale-wise this movie will be much bigger, though it probably still doesn’t even compare to Hollywood. It would be categorized as a fantasy film — kind of like a Lord of the Rings fantasy.

SPWUG: And is there anything about [Vexille] that you want the fans to know about, and the questions they should be asking themselves after they’ve seen it and as they are walking out of the theater?

SORI: I worry that the people are losing human contact… that people are losing direct one-on-one contact with each other. People are using so many information-driven technologies — the Internet, cell phones — there’s so many connections made through technologies that there’s no longer any physical contact.

Communication is becoming so technology-driven, so I would like people to think about perhaps the danger of relying on these convenient technologies so much, and what may or could happen if we continue to rely on this technology-driven society.

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Thanks go out to Jackie Smith of FUNimation for setting this up, and to Chiho for translating for us. Look for the Vexille DVD from FUNimation to be out on shelves May 20th, 2008!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Joe Chan, anime. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.