Deemo: Memorial Keys review

Although Western animation frequently employs full computer-generated imagery (or CGI), Japan hasn’t embraced the technology as swiftly. The reasons for this are rooted in the budgetary as well as the artistic. Historically, anime has embraced a ‘limited animation’ technique that recycles cells. This system allows animators to draw only new elements in each scene, which substantially saves time. This approach, coupled with a relatively lower framerate (often 8-12 frames per second), provides the medium with its distinctive look.

With the costs of technology declining, CG has been challenging tradition in Japan. For Earwig and the Witch, Gorô Miyazaki, the son of famed animator Hayao Miyazaki, created an imaginative computer-generated world that rivaled the look of any computer-generated animation from Hollywood. But it felt a bit soulless when contrasted with the painterly style of his contemporaries.

At times, that same feeling afflicts director Shūhei Matsushita’s Deemo: Memorial Keys. The 89-minute film employs a majority amount of CGI animation. Transitions between the customary ‘limitation animation’ shots and the fluid computer-generated ones will probably produce visual dissonance. The bigger issue is that the technologically-rendered actors resemble the aesthetics of a video game character. If you’re a gamer, Memorial Keys can often look like a cutscene.

But there’s an upside to the technology. Frequently, the film follows the film’s protagonist, a young girl named Alice, through imaginative settings like coiling hallways filled with piles of books or inside a location that resembles the interior of a giant metronome. When the camera sweeps through these areas, there’s a sense of smoothness as the camera lithely frames the action. Later, there’s a sequence that mimics the twists and turns of a roller coaster ride, which is elevated by the sinuousness that new technologies offer.

An adaptation from the eponymous music rhythm video game, Deemo’s fairy tail-esque plotline is rather skeletal. With only nine characters, the modest-sided cast channels the economy of a theatrical play. The story revolves around Alice’s fall into an ornate chasm and her attempt to flee the pit. Hope is rooted in a magical tree that grows whenever the film’s mysterious and lanky title character plays a piano at the bottom of the abyss. Every time Deemo finds and plays a melody from new sheet music, the tree flourishes and blossoms, reaching toward an exit in the ceiling.

Deemo’s musical interludes are some of the film’s best moments, with the editing rhythm mirroring the pacing of each lovely composition. Some convey hope, as the tree reaches upward. When a mysterious masked interloper presents a faster, more complex piece for Deemo to perform, the result is a whirlwind. This too, captures the intensity of the music, not unlike Fantasia’s adaption of Stravinsky’s turbulent “Rite of Spring”.

Initially, the characters who live with Alice and Deemo at the bottom of this chasm offer little more than comic relief. Gradually, the film gives each character a bit of development and they become more endearing, with the stuffed cat Mirai given a speaking part for this adaptation. But the best addition is the all-new framing story that reveals Alice in a high school setting, as fellow students and an instructor offer compassion.

Deemo: Memorial Keys is a decent adaptation of the game. Despite a reliance on moderately amusing sidekicks and a look that can’t quite camouflage the difference between hand-drawn and CG animation, it’s worth a watch. Despite a sluggish first act, the tempo of the film quickens and the cast begins to grow on you, while the musical interludes are thoroughly entertaining.  But it’s hard not to yearn for all the talent here to create an original film that isn’t entwined with the burdens of the source material. Even if it’s all CGI.

Deemo: Memorial Keys is available on a Blu-ray/DVD
bundle directly from Shout Factory.