Technotise: Edit & I Review

4 stars for this imaginative and gritty anime style film.

Technotise: Edit & I is a Serbian Cyber-punk anime hybrid, written and directed by renowned comic book author and artist Aleksa Gajic and set in Belgrade in 2074.

This is a futuristic world, full of strange vehicles, homeless robots, flying cars and hover boards.

Edit (Sanda Knezevic) is a student who is struggling with her life. She keeps failing her exams, her boyfriend Bojan (Nikola Djuricko) and indeed all of her friends are stoners and her parents won’t stop nagging her. She has a job, looking after an autistic boy, Abel (Igor Bugarski), who is a mathematical genius, but even that isn’t going well, he still hasn’t spoken and she can’t get through to him.

After failing her exam yet again, she is forced to consider other options, so she turns to her drug dealer friend. He implants a revolutionary new chip into her arm, which greatly increases her capacity for remembering things. He will allow her to keep it for three weeks, after which time he will take it out. Armed with this new ability, she settles down to the business of revising.

Things soon begin to turn strange. When Abel finally speaks it is to warn her about an impending phone call from her boss, who is about to tell her what his work is really about, even though it is a top secret research project. Abel has made a discovery, the ultimate truth about the universe and energy which it is believed will confer the ability to see the future. However, after making the discovery he has withdrawn and won’t speak and all they have is the formula.

When entered into a computer, they try to process it and then go into a state known as “algorithm absurd”, where they become self aware and simply shut down. Abel is the only one who knows the final part of the puzzle.

Something happens to Edit when she sees the result of this work, and from then on she starts to see a mysterious stranger wherever she goes. She also starts to set off metal detectors and it becomes apparent that not only is the chip more powerful than she thought, it is also highly sought after by various interested parties.

Technotise: Edit & I is beautiful to look at, the animation style is gorgeous, with very high levels of detail and well thought out characters. The story is also great, very interesting and with some surprising twists and turns which had me gripped right to the end. The world in which it’s set is fascinating, someone clearly had fun designing all the futuristic vehicles, and hover board racing is always going to be a winner.

The animation is very clearly Western, despite it’s similarities to anime the whole thing has a totally different feel about it. If I have a complaint it is that the subtitles are very quick indeed, blink and you miss it, sometimes they are white on white so you can’t read them properly and the translation does leave a bit to be desired in quite a few places.

All in all though, this is a great film, well worth a watch for any fans of proper sci-fi, grab the popcorn and get your hoverboard out.