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Broken Saints
Anime DVD Review
In the quiet corners of the globe, four strangers, a cynical American programmer, an aging Japanese priest, a troubled Arabic mercenary and a mysterious Fijian girl, receive a series of chilling apocalyptic visions. Desperate to understand their frightening visions of the future, these four troubled souls are simultaneously drawn to a dark city in the West where their fates, and the fate of the world, are revealed to be linked together and somehow part of a global conspiracy. Amidst an epic struggle of man, machine and otherworldly fear, these reluctant heroes must be willing to sacrifice everything...in order to know the truth and save us all!
At Anime.com, we're all for people who are willing to "roll their own" anime films and make something that's a personal vision and breaks the boundaries of "standard" entertainment. Broken Saints is the creation of three impoverished artists in Canada who had an idea back in 2001 to create a web-comic based on the then emerging technology of Flash.
 Visually stunning, masterfully told, viscerally thrilling; Broken Saints is a controversial and critically acclaimed graphic novel saga that fuses anime stylings, comic book text, cinematic effects and music into a revolutionary multimedia experience of modern storytelling.
Its animatic style of limited animation keeps to its graphic novel origins and also contributes a great deal to its creepiness. By looking so unreal, the viewer allows himself to suspend disbelief and be swept up in the storyline.
The DVD set contains over 10 hours of material, as well as a plethora of extras (including a "making of" film where you realize it is all produced in an underlit, cinderblock industrial basement) that will keep you entertained, and, hopefully, will introduce you to a new kind of storytelling experience.
Reviewed by Brian Cirulnick, October 2006
Below: Scenes from Broken Saints.
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