| Sumario: | Sakaguchi Hironobu's "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" (2001) was the first entirely computer-generated film to produce a nearly perfect, cinematic photorealism. This article argues that the significance of this film lies less in the technological achievement of its computer graphics than in the questions it raises about the conceptualization and representation of life in analog and digital media, as well as in popular genres such as science fiction. I argue that a contingent, historically specific notion of life (and death) as artificial life, or a-life, provides continuity and cross-fertilization between analog and digital moving-image media on the one hand and information-based life sciences on the other. Articulated in varying forms ranging from cinema’s animism, or ersatz of life, to the life effect of computer-generated Artificial Life ecologies, this notion of a-life is uncanny because it is predicated on life excess, as well as on the constant reenactment of an absence. While this absence has as a rule been the result of the abduction of women's (or of marginalized, disenfranchised groups') agency and cultural contributions, "Final Fantasy" also alerts us to this violent erasure’s history of suppression in the cinema, animation, and software culture, as well as in science fiction, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The conclusion of the essay argues that, in spite of all these traditions' repeated attempts to eradicate the haunting memory of the missing woman, it is her stubborn return as life effect that produces a persistently unheimlich sensation, and an "unheimlich" aesthetics in much contemporary science fiction, as well as in other genres in our global network culture.
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