The story in this movie has a lot of changes than the anime. Actually this movie is loosely based on Ishinomori's epic. This happened because this movie had a big problem. How could it to introduce to teenagers nowadays who grew up with fast paced anime, with lots of gore and fights like Tokyo ghoul, Naruto, Bleach and many more, a story that was written in the middle of the 70's. In order to manage this the movie ditches the somehow naive story of the anime and takes the story's setting to today's world. I liked it that. Sure it didn't remind me at all the classic anime but as I said this is mostly a try to introduce the story to teenagers today. And I believe it did it very well. I had a little problem with the plot though. I would like it if it wasn't so much Americanized. But I will explain this later. Also it isn't necessary to see the anime but I would recommend it if you want to know some things about the characters.
About the animation itself I can't find words to describe it. Production IG did a stunning job. The animation is amazing and the movie doesn't loose any opportunity to show it off in almost every scene. I was captivated by it right from the first moment. I couldn't find any flow in it no matter how hard I tried. If I could rate it with mark above 10 i would gladly do it. Another thing that I liked in this movie was the sound. A first class budged movie demands a first class voice actors. Mamoru Miyano, Daisuke Ono, Toru Okawa Noriaki Sugiyama and all the other seiyuus did an excellent job capturing their characters personalities almost as good as voice actors of the 2001 anime's. Also this movie had excellent OST's and really good sound effects. For the latter you just have to listen to Ivan's voice every time he speaks.
The characters was the weakest link of this movie. Because the characters wouldn't appeal to the teenagers with their obsolete 70's animation changes were made not only in their design (which was fair I have to say) but mostly in their personalities. The movie introduced the characters like they were an X-Men rip off. Because of the already mentioned Americanization the characters were made to look like American superheroes and this way a little bit of their personalities was lost. In either way if you haven't seen any of the previews anime adaptation I don't thing you will have a big problem with this.
Summarizing, I have to say that I was really pleased with this movie. It didn't looked like the anime series at all but I don't think this was a problem. It did a fairly good job at introducing Joe and the others in the new generation. I'm really curious to see if there's gonna be another adaptation. Who knows maybe in a decade or so we will see a crossover between between the 00 cyborgs and X-men. I would like to see that.
