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Aero-Troopers
As the
sun pours through thick glass, aged hands write the tale of
a young man with a dream. Joshua, an inhabitant of a world
of colonies built on flying islands of trees, longs to fly
under his own power. Before he can test his make-shift aeroplane,
a huge sky-whale with sharp teeth destroys his entire colony,
and the now orphaned Joshua must find a home, and salvation,
among the Aero-Troopers.
Even
without Mark
Hamill's warm narration, it would be obvious that those
hands reflected in the window belong to a much older Joshua.
But what we should really focus on here is another young man
with a dream: Terry Izumi.
A former
Imagineer, Izumi spent time sculpting Disney collectibles
and doing art direction on videogames. Eventually, he put
together a small team of his own to create a computer-animated
film. Here's the rub: he did the whole thing on Apple Macintoshes.
Not even Apple CEO's Steve Jobs' Pixar Studios does that.
Yet.
Some
might call it a mad dream, but Izumi pulled it off, and after
shopping it around with a self-recorded soundtrack, attracted
the attention of some top animation voice-over talent. The
result is Aero-Troopers (occasionally subtitled The
Nemeclous Crusade), a fantasy adventure that dips a toe
into steampunk, but with a main goal of entertaining children.
In addition
to narrating, Hamill serves as voice-director for the project,
and pulled in many of his cohorts from Comic
Book: The Movie.
It may sound like Hamill does extra voice duty, too, but actually
Jess Harnell does his Hamill imitation for the character called
only "Mad Pirate" that still has a fairly large role.
Most
of the film chronicles Joshua's trials to become an Aero-Trooper
and avenge his people. That may sound a bit bloodthirsty,
but that flying whale turns out to actually be a huge mechanical
device. The actual violence is done in a circumspect way,
with the majority of the film focusing more on the everyday
experience of these people living in a world that apparently
has no land. Izumi has thought out this environment in great
detail, dropping little tidbits throughout the story that
also make it clear he has more to tell.
Though
the young boy becoming a man (eventually) takes center stage,
younger viewers may be just as drawn in by his teacher, Qyun
(Daran Norris). Izumi's script makes a passing reference to
Qyun being not actually human (and it may be the name of his
race), using the character as the moral center of the story.
It is Qyun's philosophies that run through Joshua's head at
every turn, and as another character Nora (E.G. Dailey) points
out, also give the boy strange syntax. Though it has to be
purely coincidence, Qyun actually resembles the man who voices
him, though the character is lightyears away from Norris'
most currently popular role as Cosmo on The Fairly Oddparents.
At its
heart, the story is fairly simple, but it's clear that putting
it together was not. The new vocal team brings a lot to the
production, and the recent DVD release does not include any
snippets of the previous track for comparison.
In fact,
the DVD only offers Chapter Stops as an extra, a convenient
feature to savor a few particularly well-done sequences. Aero-Troopers
doesn't quite portray humanoids convincingly (Pixar really
hasn't done that yet, either). In some places, admittedly,
sequences look like they could just as easily fit in a videogame.
But what it may lack in technical smoothness in places, Aero-Troopers
makes up for in imagination.
Any time
somebody offers that up, it's worth checking out.
Check
Out Aero-Troopers at The Creative Light Store
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