Square accumulated four SGI SGI Origin 2000 series servers, four Onyx2 systems, and 167 Octane workstations.• The basic movie was rendered at a home-made render farm which consisted of 960 Pentium III-933MHz workstations. The render farm was made by Square Pictures located in Hawaii. Later in 2001 nVidia released a technology demo for the NVIDIA Quadro DCC, rendering several scenes from the movie in real-time (compared with 1.5 hours per frame for the movie), albeit at only 10 frames per second and with much lower quality (simpler model with noticeable polygons, clipping problems, less realistic skin and textile with no/poor shaders – "plastic" look, unrealistic lighting, poor specular highlighting and very limited self-shadowing). The film had cost overruns during the end of production.•

The Square Pictures render farm and the nVidia demo used completely different and unrelated rendering algorithms -- ray tracing and other pixel-by-pixel CPU-based techniques never intended interactive speeds by the former, and a GPU-based rasterized polygon mesh by the latter. The render farm also rendered at resolutions far higher than the GeForce 3 is capable of. This makes frame-rate comparisons between the two uninformative. Rather, the demo showed the high quality that raster graphics had achieved.

Prior to the film's release (and subsequent box office failure), Square had indicated plans for the Aki Ross "synthetic actress" to appear in other films, possibly even interacting with live actors. A sample of what this might have looked like can be seen on the introduction to the second DVD in the Special Edition release, which shows Aki "breaking character" after filming a scene and walking through the studio, interacting with both CGI and real people. Chris Lee, the producer of Final Fantasy, defended his use of animation, stating that live actors often cannot physically accomplish what computer characters easily can, citing his experience from making Starship Troopers and Godzilla. An early scene in the movie, in which Aki floats weightless in an orbital spacecraft, illustrates his point: such scenes are trivial to shoot when your actress has no weight to begin with. Lee also noted that the difference between the CGI and live action footage can be jarring for viewers when the film requires heavy use of computer effects in almost every scene. Shortly after the release of the film, the character of Aki Ross became the first computer-generated entry in Maxim's Hot 100.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is set on an alien-infested Earth in the year 2065. The remaining humans live in "barrier cities" all over the world and attempt to free their planet from the Phantoms, an alien race. The only hope for the planet comes from the scientist Aki Ross and her mentor, Dr. Sid, who have a plan to destroy the Phantoms without damaging the planet, but a general named Hein is determined to use the Zeus space cannon to destroy the Phantoms—even if it means destroying the Earth in the process.
While the film does carry the name Final Fantasy, it is only vaguely thematically related to Square Co., Ltd.'s popular Final Fantasy series of games. However, Dr. Sid's Gaia Theory, relating to a lifeforce within the planet to which spirits belong, is highly reminiscent of the Lifestream/Mako in Final Fantasy VII. The plot, characters, and storyline were all created specifically for the movie although the character of Dr. Sid does continue the games' tradition of having a character named Cid appear in most Final Fantasy games, despite the Doctor's name spelled with an untraditional "S".

The North American box office results were at $32 million. The shortfall from the high cost of production of $137 million (including$30 million for marketing) essentially bankrupted Square Pictures, the subsidiary of Square that produced it. However, Square Pictures did survive long enough to produce an animated tie-in to The Matrix, Final Flight of the Osiris (see also The Animatrix). Final Flight of the Osiris increased the level of realism shown, addressing some of the "painted statue" criticisms.

The film also made $55 million more overseas, meaning total losses were approximately $123 million (the studio typically receives half the box office gross). The domestic box office loss was--at the time--the largest in film history. It is commonly agreed that the financial failure of the film coupled with other circumstances at the time proved to be the catalyst that inspired Square Co., Ltd.'s merger with Enix.


The film received mixed reviews but was not a popular success. Because the plot is typical of Japanese science fiction anime in melding science fiction and spirituality, the movie seemed to be best received by otaku, or at least regular viewers of anime. In some aspects, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was more or less a big-budget anime movie. It became more unpopular when fans of the Final Fantasy series watched the movie to discover that it had little connection to the game series.

While many of the critics of the film cited problems with the story or complained of one-dimensional characters, others focused on the failings of the animation itself. While the rendering is intended to be photorealistic, the characters' motions and expressions can be seen as stiff and unexpressive compared to real human motion. This is most notable in the "doll-eyed stare" of the characters, but also in the rigid poses and gaits of the characters and the lack of deformation in skin and tissue accompanying character motion such as speech and grasping. The modeling of lighting on skin and hair (which in reality are subtly translucent) is also limited, giving the characters a "painted statue" look. As a result, the film is often cited as an example of animation that falls into the uncanny valley, perhaps most famously by critic Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert was one of the films biggest advocates, giving the film 3 1/2 stars out of 4. He also expressed a desire for the film to succeed in hopes of seeing more films made in its image, though he was skeptical of its ability to be accepted.*