One of my all time favorites.

Beautiful, moving film.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Renaissance is a black-and-white animated science fiction film that features a rare visual style in which almost all images are exclusively black and white, with only occasional color used for detail.It centers on a policeman investigating the kidnapping of a scientist who holds the key to eternal life in a futuristic Paris.It has an English cast led by Daniel Craig together with Catherine McCormack,Romola Garai and Jonathan Pryce; and a French cast that includes Patrick Floersheim,Laura Blanc,Virginie Mery and Gabriel Le Doze.It mixes Blade Runner aesthetics with stark, Sin City-style visuals, Renaissance was filmed using motion- capture animation and features extravagant production design by Alfred Frazzani. French director Christian Volckman was at helm for this film.In the labyrinthine streets of 21st century Paris, where every move is monitored and ever action recorded, a mysterious kidnapping sets into motion a catastrophic series of events that could ultimately prove the downfall of civilization. The year is 2054, and the Avalon Corporation has securely woven its way into every aspect of modern living by making youth and beauty the most valued commodity around. Troubles arise in the City of Lights when a high-profile scientist named Ilona is kidnapped, and policeman Barthélémy Karas is assigned the task of solving the case. As his investigation leads Karas down a menacing path where death lurks around every bend, he soon discovers that events that took place in 2006 have cast a dark shadow over the future of humankind.The film attempts to blend sci-fi wonder with stark noir animation, but is often more fun to look at than to watch. It's a testament to the production design that one quickly gets caught up in the story without ever completely losing the "ooh-ahh" factor. Ominous, wall-to-wall music bolsters the appropriately uneasy mood, and the bittersweet conclusion is satisfying. The picture is visually stark and isolated compositions, spiked with high contrast menace, are impressive in their artistic detail. However, the perfunctory plot is rather average .It is a fusion of crime clichés and dystopian futurism, if not exactly original, is nonetheless vigorously engaging.

I heard many bad things about "Renaissance": That it was boring and flawed, that it was a rip-off of "Sin City". Too good I didn't paid attention to any of that criticism. "Renaissance" is a good, interesting thriller with incredible visuals and a fascinating story. A great homage to classic detective, films, with a great atmosphere. And just because it is black and white, it doesn't make it a rip-off, and what is more, I liked it more than "Sin City", because unlike that film, "Renaissance", this was subtle, thrilling and realistic, without any of the stupid and cartoonish excesses from movies as "Wanted" or "300"."Renaissance" is a good, underrated film that deserves a lot more of appreciation.I give this ten stars.

I am glad being able to say almost only positive things about the movie with Karas and the Tasuiev sisters, RENAISSANCE.And firstly, that it looks as it ought to look; a boys' adventure, RENAISSANCE is the tale of a cop's investigation in search of a missing young scientist—Ilona Tasuiev, the geneticist and researcher for the Avalon company.The tale of Karas, Ilona and Bislane is, though much less known than SIN CITY, the better movie, and the one more appreciated by the connoisseurs. To the French comics aficionados it will be even more meaningful (I have enriched my French comics collection last week, though I'm not so up—to—date). The atmosphere, the music, the characters, their lines, the plot are all nice and endearing. A Parisian top cop, Karas, is displayed to find a young woman who was a rising star of medical—genetic research, Ilona Tasuiev—a mildly hot blonde, whose rebel sister Bislane was erotically preferable, I guess.For me, an oldie aficionado of comics and TV series, RENAISSANCE, a marvelously beautiful cartoon, was like a replay of a WILD WILD WEST episode—here, a mythological past replaced with an equally mythological future—more jaded and blasé but, in a sense, as thrilling. RENAISSANCE is not suspenseful; nor does it look especially well—paced; but it's seducing and hypnotic. Moreover, it achieves sketching, albeit briefly, a world, a true world—and we will think about the Avalon, Nakata, Jonas Mueller, the Tasuiev sisters, and Goran, Farfella, and Karas telling of his distant childhood in Kasbah …. I liked RENAISSANCE's feel, of a certain gentleness and affability and adventurousness, and also the professional, assured look; among these new cartoons, this one and Linklater's Dick adaptation (--the only and first Dick adaptation ever--) stood out for me as works of beauty and genuine excitement.I thought the futuristic devices were appropriate and, when not conventional, vividly eerie (like the invisibility costumes).As advisable, the characters have exotic names, like Bislane and Farfella, mostly gathered from the arts and entertainment's world (Goran and Ilona and Naghib …).None seems to have noticed that RENAISSANCE's poster features a Rourke look-alike—that guy is Marv; which doesn't make it a SIN CITY rip--off, but not a paragon of originality either, and in fact there's more resemblance to the Miller tale—namely, the bleak futuristic look of a decayed society, the brio of the hero (in fact a cross of Willis' character and Rourke's persona in the previous movie …)–on the other hand, this cartoon breathes a more public air, a brim of straight adventurousness, and, in a word, it's like SIN CITY for kids—well, naughtier kids I mean, 'cause there's a bit of nudity on display. To what I have said one might retort that the traits mentioned are characteristic, even as clichés and common places of the futuristic more adult comics' look; true enough, and it was oldie Miller to have brought that things on screen and RENAISSANCE bears some resemblances here and there. Now it's also fair that every RING ought to have its ERAGORN, so to each sin city, its renaissance. I admit being quite partial to these bleak futuristic tales, a rather undemanding specialty.

Punctuating the opening credits sequence is a swarthy man having a strange, all-too-real nightmare. Closing in on its dystopic 2054 Paris, the film begins to follow a woman into a grungy club, where she and a Slavic bartender convene outside on the deck. They toss exclamations at each other to the effect that she owes him more money although she believes she's paid it all. Another woman obstructs the budding violence, only to have a bitter fight with the woman herself. The initial woman storms out, and she is kidnapped. Christian Volckman's Renaissance appears to be another one in an assembly line of recent motion-capture-animated sci-fi noir pictures, but in spite of whether or not that is essentially true, it tells a neatly arranged, classically unraveling detective story that keeps us in the dark in its opening minutes, even whilst introducing Karas, the hard-boiled cop we recognize from the beginning as the man awakening from a terrible dream.The rudiments of classic film noir are all hit upon without any anachronistic changes, for all intents and purposes. It is in the harshness of its monochrome that Volckman's French thriller has followed no example. For the film's animators, unfettered by the challenges of physical lighting that would normally be faced, have been able to begin with a totally black frame, and to affix utter pitch-white according to the action on screen. As they scrupulously imitate the effects of real light sources throughout the frame, the distinction of black and white here is full-blown without even any of the slightest shades of gray to tone with the characters' less starkly definite moral codes, and the outcome is a harsh and judgmental vision of the direction in which commercial civilization is going, sporadically caused to undergo the most blaring and ruthless of illumination. It is the artistic study of film noir taken to their visual boundary of its philosophy, and nothing before has ever shared quite the same execution of this visual concept.All the characters in this decent cyberpunk film seem as if to have been walk off with purely from a Gothic comic book in black ink, but all together their physical responses, their motions and the nuances of their facial expressions look ashore within a clear humanity. Normally, films that try out new developments in animation allow their technical advances upstage all other facets of production. Sin City, for example, left substance and overall good screen adaptation from its source material to be desired.It may not be mind-blowing, it may have its narrative conventions and its voice-over cast may simply be adequate, but Renaissance, made for $19 million over six years, not only feels like actual noir instead of a rashly penned appropriation, but also is not secondary to all the visual innovation, which is played as if to be incidental. One leaves thinking not so much about how cool it is when Karas is evading bullets shot through a crowded glass Parisian street, but more about its ponderance of life and death, how life's tragedies, such as death, make life meaningful.