Spriggan is very pretty. You can easily see that a large amount of money has been invested into making this anime shine, even down to the dubbing of solid voice actors and near perfect lip synching. Spriggan also has all the necessary parts of a great anime, with an incredible hero, a powerful villain and enough nonsensical metaphysics to make some of the dialogue come out sounding intelligent (provided you don't think about it, of course). The superpowers that each of the main characters possess are interesting enough and the action doesn't pause for long.
But something is missing. The bad guy is evil for no particular reason, which is pretty standard in anime but in Spriggan he appears to be just following the manual: "Use powers to take over powerful artifact. Use artifact for own ends". A little bit of dialogue to give him some purpose would have been nice.
The fact that two world class organisations are fighting each other for the fate of the world means very little as the narrative never really bothers to outline the ethics of either group. Which one is the evil? Oh, the one that the protagonist fights against. Of course. Both seemed as bad as each other to me, but I recognise that the movie comes from a much longer series of manga comics so I'm probably not getting the whole Spriggan story.
Overall, Spriggan hits all of the anime action cliches with a higher production value than most. Switch your brain off and enjoy the ride.
But something is missing. The bad guy is evil for no particular reason, which is pretty standard in anime but in Spriggan he appears to be just following the manual: "Use powers to take over powerful artifact. Use artifact for own ends". A little bit of dialogue to give him some purpose would have been nice.
The fact that two world class organisations are fighting each other for the fate of the world means very little as the narrative never really bothers to outline the ethics of either group. Which one is the evil? Oh, the one that the protagonist fights against. Of course. Both seemed as bad as each other to me, but I recognise that the movie comes from a much longer series of manga comics so I'm probably not getting the whole Spriggan story.
Overall, Spriggan hits all of the anime action cliches with a higher production value than most. Switch your brain off and enjoy the ride.