Aki Ross: The world’s first CGI-created actor
The rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes has created a great number of entirely valid concerns, but if one ambitious plan in particular had been realised, then the world’s first digitally-created actor would be more than 20 years into her career by now.
Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a monumental undertaking as it was, with the most expensive video game adaptation ever made at the time doubling as the world’s first photorealistic computer-animated feature. Ming-Na Wen took top billing among the cast as Dr Aki Ross, but that was only intended to be the beginning of an audacious experiment that could have reinvented cinema.
Beyond being the most prominent character in The Spirits Within, the team responsible for creating Aki also envisioned her as having the potential to become a breakout star in her own right. She may have been comprised entirely of pixels, but there was belief that she’d prove so popular that a full-fledged career would emerge in the aftermath.
With Wen continuing to supply the vocal performance, plans were afoot for Aki to cross over into other forms of both animated and live-action media, foreshadowing the impending AI apocalypse by having an actor who didn’t exist in real life sharing the screen with flesh-and-blood actors, building up a filmography of her own, and potentially even winning awards into the bargain.
It was something Wen genuinely envisioned, as she explained at the time. “It’s my newest fantasy to accept the MTV Award for best screen kiss on behalf of Aki Ross,” she said. “I understand the kiss is already the talk of cyberspace.” Presumably, Aki would have made an ‘in-person’ appearance at the ceremony, but the nomination never ended up materialising.
Beyond that, Aki even became a sex symbol and pinup, being ranked as the 87th most desirable woman in the world as part of an annual ‘Hot 100’ list. Again, Wen was glad that it was her counterpart and not her gaining the attention. “I have never had any desire to be in Maxim,” she stated. “Aki Ross can pose for them any time she wants.”
Theoretically, based on both the burgeoning appeal of Aki and how heavily the marketing team had invested in her prospective future, there was a very real possibility that were The Spirits Within to become a monstrous success at the box office, production company Square Pictures would either be fielding offers from Hollywood or touting their most marketable asset for a variety of Stateside projects.
That didn’t happen, and in fact, it was quite the opposite. The groundbreaking animated movie with ideas several steps beyond its station was a financial disaster, one that lost so much money Square Pictures was forced to close down altogether. Just like that, those concerned that digital actors were coming to steal their jobs breathed a sigh of relief, which sounds ridiculous now, but was a creeping concern given the high hopes and major plans Aki was supposed to accomplish.
“It may take a while before someone dives into this sort of thing again,” was the opinion of computer graphics industry veteran Diana Walczak, speaking to The New York Times. It’s been more than two decades, and it hasn’t happened as of yet, but even though there’s still no such thing as a fully digital actor, de-ageing and recreating deceased performers for the sake of a cameo continues to loom large.
