General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina

Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina (アップルシードサーガエクスマキナ) is a 2007 Japanese full-CG animated science fiction film directed by Shinji Aramaki, the sequel to his 2004 film Appleseed and an adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga Appleseed, with action filmmaker John Woo among its producers.¹^•² It was produced by Digital Frontier Inc. and premiered at the Pusan International Film Festival on October 20, 2007.³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title	アップルシードサーガ　エクスマキナ (Appleseed Saga Ex Machina)¹
Release	October 20, 2007 (Japan); world premiere at the Pusan International Film Festival 2007¹
Running time	105 minutes per the Japanese Film Database; some reviews list 104 minutes¹^•²
Director / studio	Shinji Aramaki; Digital Frontier Inc.¹^•³
Producers	John Woo, Terence Chang, Hidenori Ueki, Naoko Watanabe, Joseph Chou, and others¹^•³
Source	Manga Appleseed by Shirow Masamune, creator of Ghost in the Shell; screenplay by Kiyoto Takeuchi¹
Main cast	Ai Kobayashi as Deunan Knute; Koichi Yamadera as Briareos Hecatonchires¹
Place in series	The only direct sequel among the Appleseed films, following Appleseed (2004); the collection also includes the 1988 OVA and Appleseed Alpha (2014)⁴

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film is set in Olympus, a futuristic city-nation where humans, cyborgs, and bioroids (clone humans created through DNA manipulation) coexist, in a future after a non-nuclear world war has drastically reduced humanity.⁵ The protagonists are Deunan Knute, a young female warrior, and Briareos, a veteran cyborg soldier, who are partners and lovers serving in E.S.W.A.T., the elite special forces of Olympus.⁶

The plot turns on a wave of cyborg terrorism and rioting that threatens the city's peace, apparently driven by the Conexus, a hugely popular entertainment gadget used to manipulate the behavior of the people who wear it.⁴^•² Deunan and Briareos are joined by a new character, Tereus, a bioroid cloned mostly from Briareos's DNA who looks exactly like his genetic donor; Deunan is ordered to take him as a partner while Briareos is hospitalized, creating a love triangle at the center of the story.² Reviewers describe what remains beneath the action as a techno-conspiracy thriller with that romantic triangle as its emotional core.⁷

Sources differ on the story's year: the DVD Talk review places it in 2133 AD, while The Japan Times critic Mark Schilling, a film reviewer for that newspaper, writes that the story starts in 2138.⁸^•⁹

Place in the franchise

The Appleseed film collection comprises four titles: the 1988 OVA, the 2004 CG feature, Ex Machina (2007), and the 2014 prequel Appleseed Alpha; Ex Machina is the only direct sequel among them, with the other three being separate adaptations or reimaginings of the same manga story.⁴ The manga itself, packed across volumes 1 through 4 plus Appleseed: ID and Appleseed: Hypernotes, has retained cultural relevance in part through the cinematic incarnations, including this John Woo-produced film.¹⁵

Production and animation technique

Appleseed: Ex Machina is a full-CG animation feature that uses motion capture and in-depth toon shading for facial expressions, combining deformed, anime-like design with anatomy-based modeling to balance action and character expression; the production team used a toon shader and ambient occlusion to achieve an illustration-like effect rather than a cell-animation appearance.¹⁰

Producer Joseph Chou, who had worked on The Animatrix before forming Axis Productions, described the production in a 2008 ICv2 interview: the 2004 film was made in under a year on a much smaller budget, while Ex Machina had a budget three times as large, about a year of pre-production, and a total production of roughly two and a half years.¹¹ Chou characterized the result as performance capture animation rather than key-frame animation, with four types of actors on the project: motion capture actors, stunt actors, facial movement actors, and voice actors.¹¹ He also noted a backlash among core otaku in Japan against CG and performance capture, which some fans regard as distinct from pure hand-drawn cel animation.¹¹

Schilling's review framed the film as a version upgrade of its predecessor, the animated equivalent of going from Windows 98 to XP, with cityscapes, robots, and mecha realized with detail down to scratches on chopper doors.⁹

John Woo's involvement

John Woo, the Hong Kong action director then known for the two-part Red Cliff, served as a producer, and his stylistic signature is visible throughout: two-handed gunplay, slow-motion shooting sequences, cascading shell casings, and white doves.⁵^•⁷ The AVForums review counted more than a handful of classic John Woo moments and judged that he had considerable influence on the production.⁷

Music

The theme music was contributed by HASYMO, a new unit formed by three former members of YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), and the soundtrack also features Tei Towa and Cornelius; Haruomi Hosono, himself a former YMO member, served as music supervisor.⁵^•¹ The AVForums review described the score as at times Aphex Twin-like and at times Commodore 64-like, but oddly suited to the action.¹²

Release and reception

After its Pusan premiere, the film screened at the Hawaii International Film Festival and the Jules Verne Adventure Film Festival in Los Angeles in 2007, and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the Nippon Connection Japanese film festival in 2008.¹ Warner Home Video released it on single-disc DVD, two-disc special edition DVD, and Blu-ray in the United States on March 11, 2008, rated PG-13.⁸ In Australia it was classified M (animated violence) for sale and hire on July 10, 2008.³

Critical reception favored the visuals and action over originality. DVD Talk's Justin Felix found that the film stands alone without knowledge of the earlier entries and delivers kinetic, high-octane animation with stunning cityscapes and a diverse soundtrack, despite derivative elements.⁸ The Sound & Vision reviewer rated the sequel a step up from the 2004 film in story and animation, though he noted that the action and dialogue at times resembled video game cut scenes, and he criticized the Blu-ray's video presentation for line twitter, jaggies, and banding.¹³ AVForums scored the film 8 out of 10 overall, calling it an entertaining sci-fi anime with glorious visuals and plenty of John Woo action, while observing that the story borrows from sources up to and including The Matrix.⁷ On aggregate databases, AniList lists a score of 6.7, and the Japanese service Filmarks records a user rating of 3.2 out of 5 from 1,681 reviews.⁶^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026