Renaissance will inevitably draw comparisons to Sin City and A Scanner Darkly -- the former for its attempt to bring a stark black-and-white graphic novel to life, and the latter for its technique of animating real human motions. But where Scanner employed rotoscoping -- the actual filming of actors with cartoon textures drawn over them -- Renaissance employs motion-capture, where a computer tracks the movements of actors who are wired to a device designed to record this data, with characters then animated over such data.

The nice thing about this technique is that real life is only allowed to dictate movements. It still requires some amount of imagination to design the full appearance of the animated work, and Renaissance takes full advantage of that opportunity. Its black-and-white world is a beautiful work of high contrast, with clean-lined shadow-rendered close-ups of its characters set against the intricate background details of the city architecture of near-future Paris. It's fair to say this is the closest anything's ever come to looking like a purely animated graphic novel, and here it's used to tell, not surprisingly, a science fiction noir.

So slick is the look of the movie that it overshadows (pun unintended, yet appropriate) its weaknesses, most notably in its story and originality. It's the tale of a hard-boiled police detective named Karas and his search for Ilona, a missing young woman scientist whose employer, an anti-aging corporation called Avalon, becomes more suspect. The path leads to Ilona's sister, Bislane, and a genetic scientist, Muller, all of whom seem to have pieces to a mystery involving the possibility of immortality.

The good news involves Renaissance being a detective thriller with a concern for scientific ethics; however, it's carried forth using borrowed elements from places one would expect it to borrow from -- various genres from cop stories to bleak sci-fis to anime (or, to put it another way, all the influences and descendants of Blade Runner). There appears to be a line between combining elements of what's come before to create a magnificent pastiche, and merely parroting cliches. This movie doesn't quite fully land on the side of the more noble of the two -- in the end, it's a lone cop, an attractive mysterious gal, and corrupt forces found in the highest places. We've heard this tune before, but to the movie's credit we've never seen it danced quite like this.

One other distracting issue may be worth mentioning. The movie is originally a French production, but its release in America afforded it the chance to use English-speaking actors for voice dubbing. The movie employs Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Ian Holm, Jonathan Pryce, and others, but the voicework of the cast doesn't feel natural much of the time. I imagine the movie might've sounded better in French, but this could be a minor concern overall.

So the voicework and the story try hard enough to get by, but Renaissance is really about its look. That part of the film is simply marvelous; it is art and animation we rarely get from the movies, an attempt at using the blank canvas of the movie screen to give us something that stands out visually from whatever else we might have seen. Its visual choices, from the computer-generated cityscapes to the creative uses of perspective, from the high-contrast black-and-white to the spare-inked faces, combine to create a uniquely engrossing nightmare. It clearly communicates its intentions as an homage to noir -- as a sort of purified amalgamation of its well-known dark elements -- and only falters when it doesn't express enough ambition to surpass it beyond the visual presentation.

(Released by Miramax Films and rated "R" for some violent images, sexuality, nudity and language.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.