Final Fantasy The Spirits Within (2001) - Phantom Menace Edition

Description

I was looking forward to this movie when it came out, as I imagine many people in Japan were as well. I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t agree that much of the acting by Baldwin, Buscemi, and Ming-Na Wen was distracting, nevertheless director Hironobu Sakaguchi insisted that he would not change one scene and so far no edits of this movie have ever come out. To make things worse, the Blu-Ray edition of the Japan Release (Spiritual Edition) was never released.

Changes

In this cut, all distracting or poorly acted scenes have been removed. The rare Japanese track is included as a 2nd audio option. The Final Fantasy remix “A Temple of Chaos” By Tim Sheehy was added. The credits song Spirit Dreams Inside was replaced with the Final Fantasy IV remix “Hymn to the Crystals” by RebeccaETripp. The title scene was moved from the first scene to after the intro sequence, since this is more traditional for Final Fantasy stories.

Strategy

I use a minimalist approach with the following rules:

1. Cut all scenes that include excessive human behavior - yelling, screaming, being nasty to eachother, when such behavior has little or nothing to do with the plot.
2. Reduce gore scenes to around a second or less, so the audience doesn’t have to ‘sit there and take it’

I cut scenes on the transition frame, and then mix the audio between the recombined video. Sometimes a scene is too difficult to cut on the transition frame as the audio may overlap the next shot. In this case, I decouple the audio and video and re-arrange the scene as necessary to get the result I’m looking for. With this trick, I can change who is talking to whom and reduce the tension that exists in many movie dialog scenes.

Poster

Stats

Original: Final Fanatasy (2001)
Type: FanMix
FanEdit Release Date: 9/28/2025
Original Runtime: 106
New Runtime: 89

Trailer

Distribution

Feel free to email/dm me for a copy.
Final Fantasy The Phantom Menace

My copy of FFTSW Spiritual Edition is legit and I can prove it.

Within the 2nd day of posting my fan-edits I got perm-banned from the r/fan-edits sub-reddit, and they won’t let me appeal in ModMail. I was accused of pirating my copy of Final Fantasy The Spirits Within either the Spiritual Edition DVD, or the BluRay. They never specified any details, nor asked me for proof - which is required for them to do according to their rules. I can prove my copies weren’t pirated. In fact I bought a copy of the Spiritual Edition DVD from Ebay for $60 specifically to make this fan-edit, and in accordance with the rules. The deletion of my Sonic Trilogy edit was so blatant I had to wonder if they admins were doing the bidding of the hecklers, since they followed the heckler’s extreme interpretation of racism in Hollywood movies as some kind of conspiracy theory. But this ban over piracy without asking me for a copy or checking with me at all is more than blatant - it’s systematic. We need to do more to protect the fan editors.