Two hundred year after the elimination of the evil Exdeath, reckless swordsman Prettz and the summoner Linaly are the youngsters who must save their world from Ra Devil, a bio-mechanical being from the dark moon. Set several centuries after the end of the game, this series is a distant spin-off from Final Fantasy V, whose character Batts is supposedly Linaly's ancestor.
The plot is similar to a computer game - after a few random encounters with wandering monsters, the leads must unite two warring parties to created a suitably mismatched party of fearless heroes. Pirate queen Rouge, the whip-wielding mistress of an airship crewed by leather-clad fat girls, falls in love with her sworn enemy, Valcus, leader of the Iron Wing squadron. After some mild tortures (Prettz is tickled and Linaly has to drink prune juice), the former enemies unite to fight Ra Devil, destroying both him and his Bond-villan hideout.
Final Fantasy's hackneyed quest to save four elemental crystals is upstaged by is backgrounds. As in the games, a good image wins out over the practicalities of physics or geography. With a large number of Chinese and Korean staffers, Final Fantasy lifts design ideas from all over the Orient, with the tall, thin mountains of Guilin forming a backdrop for long canals from Thailand, and old-world Chinese houses from Canton providing hangars for pseudo-Miyazaki giant airplanes.
As later Final Fantasy games achieved fame abroad, this anime was dusted off and released in English with undue prominence given to the words Final and Fantasy and rather less to its origins as a spin-off from an untranslated prequel.
Presumably intended as an attempt to make a truly international Final Fantasy movie, The Spirits Within boasted so many foreign staff members that it does not strictly qualify as "anime" within our own criteria. It was also a box office flop, although Hollywood accountancy excels at making anything look like a box office flop - the fact remains that the code and development used on Spirits Within was paid for out of the movie budget, and could be reinvested in the next game.