Colorless scheme

The French animated thriller Renaissance isn't just a black-and-white movie; it's more monochromatic than any film ever made. Director Christian Volckman oversees an animation style with such high contrast that it obliterates all shades of gray, leaving just stark whiteness and inky blackness.

As an all-pervasive symbol, Renaissance's colorless color scheme perfectly suits the film noir genre, particularly since the film presents an archetypal tale of a tough investigator trying to do good in a corrupt, morally blank cityscape. In practice, however, Renaissance's shadow play stumbles against hardboiled clichés, technological limitations and the eyestrain of its audience.

Daniel Craig, our new James Bond, provides the voice of Karas, a high-tech cop in Paris in the year 2054. Karas vows to track down and rescue Ilona (Romola Garai), a beautiful young geneticist kidnapped off the underground streets. Karas' investigation leads him from seedy nightspots in the Parisian underworld to the heavily monitored corridors of Avalon, a huge corporation run by a sinister executive (Jonathan Pryce).

Renaissance's greatest achievement may be its intricate vision of Paris half a century from now, complete with talking billboards and other Blade Runner gadgets as well as more complex architectural details that suggest the Eiffel Tower grown in all directions. A Metro tunnel with a bulletproof glass ceiling extends to the foot of Notre Dame cathedral, creating the disorienting image of pedestrians walking "on air" yards above Karas' head. Renaissance may reflect the tradition of European comic books, which specialize in rich backgrounds while their American counterparts emphasize dynamic, heroic characters.

Renaissance is literally Europe's Sin City.

At times, the animated technique and the futuristic setting play beautifully off each other. The bad guy's hit squads wear "cloaking" suits that make them invisible, except for shadowy outlines when they move or stand in the rain. Other evil goons have "night-vision" eyes that glow ominously in blacked-out offices. While walking along the red-light district, Karas passes through life-size, floating nude holograms. (Now that's what I call marketing.)

The human touch, unfortunately, escapes Renaissance almost completely. Volckman uses a variation of "motion capture" technology that films live actors and then animates them after the fact in virtual environments. It's an approach that steamrolls the actual craft of acting, erasing many of the little flickers of emotion that play across the faces. You get more feeling from the features of Pixar's talking cars and fish.

Renaissance's approach permits some lovely flourishes, like the fluid way shadows play across faces, which is unlike anything you've ever seen in a film. But the superficial touches, like the film's baroque metropolitan design, can't compensate for the lethal combination of terrible dialogue and inexpressive features, many of which look alike. Karas snarls lines like, "I don't know anything about saints, but I have an unerring instinct for sniffing out a son of a bitch!"

Most of the story unfolds like an obsessively rendered version of a bad cable-TV cop show. Karas broods, to little effect, over his troubled childhood and wrestles with his attraction to Ilona's chain-smoking sister (Catherine McCormack), but neither plot thread finds any emotional payoff. The mystery hinges on a life-extending sci-fi premise that's intriguing, but never gets the discussion it deserves. Renaissance rewards patience by building to a fascinating twist on the film noir formula. Here, saving the girl might be exactly the wrong thing to do.

Renaissance belongs in the company of other groundbreaking movies that mix live actors and computer animation, such as The Polar Express and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Most end up as frustrating but eye-catching curiosities, succeeding less as entertaining narratives than as experiments that will eventually change the way films will be made. An enormous amount of sweat and ingenuity go into movies like these, but they're still a long way from a renaissance.