Max is looking for the universe in which his rescuer brother Leon survives in this British animation, but some clever variations aside, it’s slow going
It’s been a two-way street: there are movie spin-offs of video games, and vice versa. Now comes this British animation, made at the same time as a companion game due out next year (and animated using the technology behind Fortnite). Like Blade Runner, it’s set in a futuristic American city with impossibly tall skyscrapers. Like the cult Japanese anime Akira, the storyline concerns experiments on children. Here they’re being treated at a research facility owned by an evil mega-corp where AI security guards with hi-tech machine guns keep out the protesters.
One of the kids inside is Max, a fragile boy with huge sad green eyes (voiced by Cade Tropeano). Max has been having violent dreams in which his much older brother, tough ex-marine Leon (Dave Fennoy), tries to rescue him, blasting his way past security. Leon always dies at the end of Max’s dreams – a dozen different deaths to give gamers a taste of what’s to come. The thing is, Max is not dreaming. He’s “rifting” into parallel universes. For reasons only half-explained by the script, he can jump between realities; Max is searching for the one in which Leon lives.
