Trivia / Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

• Ascended Fanon: The producers of this film openly admitted that they turned Cloud from the serious hero into the brooding loner because the fans would be familiar with this image of him.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Japanese:
    • Ayumi Ito as Tifa Lockheart
    • Masachika Ichimura as Red XIII
  • English:
    • Steve Burton as Cloud Strife
    • Rachael Leigh Cook as Tifa Lockheart
    • Christy Carlson Romano as Yuffie Kisaragi
    • Mena Suvari as Aerith Gainsborough, replacing actress and singer Mandy Moore from Kingdom Hearts
    • George Newbern as Sephiroth, replacing Lance Bass of popular boyband *NSYNC from Kingdom Hearts
    • Rick Gomez as Zack Fair
    • Although a case of Retroactive Recognition, Ariel Winter as Marlene Wallace.
• Children Voicing Children: Marlene, Denzel, and the rest of the child characters are voiced by child actors in most languages.
• Colbert Bump: Sephiroth's inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate caused a resurgence of interest in the movie, mainly because his trailer has many sequences recreating moments from Advent Children, while even using its version of "One Winged Angel".
• Dueling Works: With The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, as a continuation of the rivalry between their predecessors, with both works taking on a more "realistic" aesthetic and giving their respective protagonists (Cloud and Link) a wolf motif. Both works were successful commercially, but Twilight Princess was met with universal acclaim and continued to be quite well-regarded over the years (if not to Sacred Cow levels like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time), whereas Advent Children was very divisive (granted, its format didn't do it very many favors).
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The original CE of the movie was available only in a limited run in Japan, and equated to around $300. It included the Last Order OVA, a cap and t-shirt with the Fenrir symbol printed on each, a Play Arts FFVIIAC Cloud with Fenrir, the voiceover script, a special reprint of the original game and the movie itself, complete with director's commentary and a special features disc. An American equivalent would be released much later, with many of the physical extras (save for the OVA) removed. FFVIIAC Complete also somewhat qualifies, considering the approximately 20 minutes of new footage and the On The Way To a Smile OVA.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The first 2 trailers are infamous for being made almost entirely of test footage, none of which was used in the final movie (save the scene relating to Aerith's death). Interestingly, some screenshots of these scenes are actually on the back of the original DVD box.
• No Dub for You: An interesting subversion happens in Latin America: Originally, the film only was released as a home video release in that region, and without a dub, as result of both a lack of the mentioned theater release and the fact that neither Square Enix nor the local distributors managed to get a TV deal with any Latin American broadcasters, which likely had forced them to include a dub, through there were plans to do a Mexican-made dub done in Cuernavaca, which never materialized. However, as a result of the newer 2024 worldwide re-release of the film, not only the movie will get a Latin American theater release, but also a local Spanish dub as well.
• No Export for You: Complete's vocal theme, "Safe and Sound," is not in Western releases of the film, which is odd considering that the song is written by Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance and sung entirely in English. Furthermore, it's only available on the Japanese iTunes. "Calling" from the original version was used for the Western release.
• The Other Darrin:
  • For the English release:
    • George Newbern took over for Lance Bass^note Yes, of *NSYNC fame as Sephiroth starting with this movie.
    • For Complete, Aaron Refvem and Ariel Winter replaced Benjamin Bryan and Grace Rolek's Denzel and Marlene since the latter two actors aged out of their roles.
    • Mandy Moore had also voiced Aerith in the first Kingdom Hearts game but was replaced by Mena Suvari for this one.
  • For the Japanese release of Complete, Kazumu Izawa and Sumire Morohoshi replace Kyousuke Ikeda and Miyū Tsuzurahara as Denzel and Marlene.
• Recursive Adaptation: Advent Children is The Anime of the Game Final Fantasy VII, being a Sequel in Another Medium. And then the movie will be adapted in video game form as part of the upcoming mobile game remake Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis
• Referenced by...: Persona 5 Royal includes a card game called "Tycoon". If Futaba is one of the players, she may occasionally say "Shall I give you this pair?" when she plays a pair of cards.
• Technology Marches On: Advent Children may be a futuristic movie, but the characters use flip cellphones! This movie was released in 2005. The first smartphone would not come out until 2007. At the time, the flip cellphones used in the movie seemed advanced and futuristic.
• Throw It In!: Several minor aspects of the film, such as Rude's extra sunglasses, were tossed out by development staff as random ideas not in the original concepts, and got approval.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The initial choice for Denzel's Japanese voice actor was Kōki Uchiyama. However, he was a bit too old to fit the bill, but Tetsuya Nomura later used him in Kingdom Hearts II as the voice of Roxas and later in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep as Ventus.
  • At a very early stage in development, the only featured characters were going to be Cloud, Tifa, Kadaj, and Sephiroth. The run-time was also planned to be far lower than in the final movie; early interviews mentioned around the 40-minute mark. This would change as it became apparent that fans were expecting much more than the initial script apparently had, prompting a fairly extensive rewrite. The TGS 2003 trailer, and the unused footage it contains, probably comprises the remains of that early version of the movie.
  • Word of God says Cloud's new Limit Break was named "Omnislash Version 5" because it was the fifth version they had come up with. One wonders what the unseen others looked like...

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