RahXephon: Tagen Hensoukyoku

First of all this is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the anime series Rahxephon,it's more like auto play of all the 26 episode at 10 x speed with little cut on and add.
Movies like Evangelion 1.0,Lagann-hen seem to share similar traits: they have above-average predecessor series, but they encounter the familiar pitfall of rehashing material, perhaps in an attempt to replicate the same success in a different format. The movie chooses the same path by reusing the same events as RahXephon, tightly packing them all into one movie and hence it suffer from rushed pacing and incoherent storytelling.

Plot-
Ayato Kamina and his classmate, ... Haruka "Reika Mishima", are in middle school and are a young couple, still dealing with some awkwardness. However, the sudden appearance of visitors from an alternate dimension, the "Mu", tears the two apart. All of Tokyo is enveloped in the giant hemispherical Absolute Barrier, which looks very similar to Jupiter, and they become separated into the world inside and the world outside.

Characters-Focus mainly on the main two characters in expense of others.

Animation and music-More polished animation than the actual series and nostalgic music which somewhat make it watchable.

To be honest being a fan of rahxephon i expected more from the movie but considering it was released more than an decade ago we can't complain much, anyway the ending was something which we can cheer about.

It's been a while since I watched this movie and my memory of it as a whole was not very special, its just that it's music is one of my most favorite. With that this review says it all. I re-watched the movie a few days ago...just to clarify myself about it and boy was I thrilled.

The music was as I remembered...absolutely captivating! The movie as a whole was what would call a nice, good anime but with nothing out of the ordinary. The story was very confusing at times..indeed for those who haven't watched the anime series it can get very troublesome as they ... won't know which end's which. But it gets better eventually, though as the plot is so rushed you won't get any time to settle in. On the whole its plot needs the support of the movie to survive than the the other way round.

Artwork was ..for it's time..nicely done..especially w.r.t Rahxephon. Again however the scenes are so rushed that you don't get to grasp the full meaning of each picture..for example the Dolems (giants) were given too inadequate a time compared to the anime series, they mentioned even briefly..you start to think them as side characters whereas in the anime they hold an almost pivotal position.

Characters in the movie fared of better..at least select ones.. than most other aspects of it. In particular mental growth of the main characters is clearly visible. Here too though some mismanagement made it's way in for some characters who were proudly introduced but then conveniently ignored.
This contributes to a lot of headache in understanding the story.

In the end however, the soundtrack impressed me a lot..even if little else did. The music is absolutely fantastic..though it has only one real song. Then again you might expect at least this from an anime whose main theme is a musical world. The assertion that the movie was saved only thanks to its music would hardly be unfair. In particular a certain soundtrack in the middle of the movie almost made me cry. I would thus definitely recommend the movie to any lover of anime music, I can virtually guarantee that you won't be disappointed.

In a sense a person can truly enjoy the movie only if he hasn't seen the anime first...otherwise the whole plot is spoiled. That's the way it worked for me.

Well, like any anime series that has a rise of popularity or being noteworthy, it was getting the compilation treatment of combining all 26 episodes of the series into a 120-minute feature-length film. Now projects like this often can screw up, especially in BONES’ case, although Eureka Seven made an alternate version of the series into a movie and how bad the reception it had gotten but there is the case of the two Puella Magi Madoka Magica movies that’s been running in theaters and has gotten great reception, so I’m quite skeptical on this.

Ayato Kamina was separated from the girl he loved, Haruka Mishima, ... when an event occurred that was thought to have killed everyone outside of Tokyo. But one day three years later, invaders suddenly attacked the city. It was then that he meets an agent of TERRA, Haruka Shitow, who tells him that she will give him the truth about the world. It is the beginning of a series of strange events, which involve him activating a giant mecha, the RahXephon and finding out that many people, including his own mother, has blue blood, and that he was actually living in a self-encased dimension where time moves slower than that of the outside world.

Well, like I said, this is a remixed version of the series and nothing I can say is going to sound different from the review of the series I did but I can say that it has the whole copy-and-paste feel to it as some of us know what’s going to happen with some added things that I never did notice fully, like the relationship between Ayato and Haruka Shitow, who has got me thinking that either she might be Mishima based off some of the Intel I got from it. There is also the fact with Quon not being fully utilized into the story but only bits and parts of it and also Megumi, Asahina (well, she wasn’t pushed aside but concluded her character quicker than the show did), & the other supporting characters are mostly pushed into the sideline or some that feel like they don’t exist at all. Now, about the romance angle between Ayato and Haruka Shitow, it does have the romantic link/theory between him and Mishima, thinking that all this time that he’s chasing to find her; she’s been there the whole time but I got a feeling it’s close to being like the romance in the Eureka Seven movie, which resulted into being romantic but instead of going with the mind and sometimes a little from the heart, it went with its head far up its ass.

For the animation, once again, BONES did an amazing job handing the mecha fight scenes, the art style being muted yet craftily done, and the backgrounds are tastily done to an extent. For the music, all the background music in there is fine, just like the series minus the awesome Yoko Kanno-produced opening, and I noticed some of the tracks in the film itself and the ending theme was marginally good for what it is.

And for the ADV Films dub, like I said, everybody did fine in the dub including Chris Patton as Ayato and I can say that Monica Rial as Haruka Shitow did approve on her performance and she didn’t quite overact like she did before.

FINAL VERDICT: Well, if I had a choice to choose between the movie and the series, I couldn’t because either way, this show is still good but I’ll say if you want to watch it but in the span of 2 hours, I would check the movie out. It does copy and paste some of the episodes in there but for a shorter pace and gets to the straight and narrow. But if you’re like me and you don’t care otherwise, check all things in the RahXephon universe.