There's lots of philosophical themes in the movie, many of which go nowhere and aren't really explored beyond talking about them.
It's great material if you're an over thinker and actual like sitting on your ass for two hours while boring characters read textbooks to you.
Note that the rest of the review can contain spoilers.
-Presentation (Visuals & Sound).
I was actually kind of surprised at how they seamlessly connect the CGI and the hand drawn characters at some points.
It was good to see some CGI that didn't just appear awkward.
Of course the CGI still sticks out at points, but at other times I found myself questioning if the character in front of me was hand drawn or a model.
It can look a bit cheap the way they just spin the camera around the characters when nothing other visually interesting is happening on screen, but when it want's to look good it looks really good.
I heard that EGOIST is the theme song performer, which makes sense because there is only one memorable song in the entire movie, the others would fit into any generic Science fiction story, or any generic action scene.
I didn't actually notice that much music in the Movie.
-Story & Characters.
Harmony is a movie that tries way too hard too seem deep and meaningful by essentially quoting philosophy textbooks and telling some of the story through flashbacks and heavy internal monologues.
Every character in the movie exist either to infodump the MC and the viewer or to be infodumped to by other characters, which immediately after they either disappear from the movie and aren't brought back again or die.
The story itself is nothing new, a "utopian future", in which everyone is in strict control of the government, this seems to be a rising trend in current settings.
And you're supposed to question if it is right to control people if they're happy and such.
The plot is almost exclusively told through dull infodumps in dialogue scenes, flashbacks and internal monologues.
There is a little attempted symbolism but it's mostly so blatant that I question why its even there.
Despite the constant infodumping and terminology, very little actually happens on screen in this movie, and everything is resolved quite hastily at the very end.
The movie tried very hard to be deep, but was scared that if they didn't tell the viewer absolutely everything they might not understand the movie.
If you have seen a movie in forever you already know all the possible "twists" it could throw your way already.
There were no interesting characters in the entire movie, the closest we get to that is our main character's friend Miach, appears throughout the movie in flashbacks, her character is that she is 15, very edgy and has a lesbian relationship with Tuan, the main character.
Speaking of Tuan, she has very little personality and mostly works as the eyes, or rather the ears for the viewer.
The most interesting thing about her character is that she's kind of good at fighting with guns.
She almost seems to be stuck in some kind of a video game dialogue tree, where if a character presents a plot point or an unconnected philosophical theme she can only say
"tell me more" "tell me more".
Every single other character exists to either infodump or die.
Forget character development, even establishing basic quirks was too much for this movie.
And I wouldn't complain so much about the characters if the story was halfway decent, or even interestingly told, but it's not.
-Final thoughts.
I don't hate the movie despite the way this review might sound like, it was just extremely boring and told almost only though exposition.
Especially the characters were dull.
The visuals were actually pretty good and there's one song that I actually liked, but that isn't even close to redeeming this movie.
I can't really even recommend Harmony as a popcorn flick, it has far too few action scenes for that.
You honestly miss nothing by skipping this one.
Update: Post-review thoughts.
After making this review I noticed it was directed by Michael Arias, a non-Japanese person working in the anime industry.
This made me interested the other movie he directed, Tekkon Kinkreet which is a much better movie and I would recommend it over this one.
I do like this Arias as a director, but he was clearly held back by the source material here.
Speaking of the source material, something I forgot to mention is that some things in this movie can actually be explained by just saying "because it looks cool".
Why is everything pink?
Why is there a random sunflower farm in the middle of the desert?
why do people dress weirdly in the future?
It's not a bad thing to include cool stuff in your movie of course, but here it also doesn't really add to the themes or the story either.
