X/1999

This movie is horrible. It is so bad that it's entertaining. If you've never read the manga or know nothing of the characters then it will make almost no sense. If you have however it's kind of amazing to watch it all pushed together. It's almost like watching a movie condensed into 30 seconds. Only it's a long overly complicated manga plot condensed to movie length with lots of barely explained fight scenes.

It's CLAMP, so it's pretty. This is a given. But that's about all it has going for it when it comes to technical merit.

SPOILER!!!

Someone's head gets cut off practically every ten ... minutes (or at least dies in some gruesome way). They fit the deaths of most of the cast into the movie. Someone should turn it into a drinking game.

I think my mother summed it up best: "Who are these people and why did they just kill each other? It looked like it was important for some reason."

SPOILER WARNING !! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

Well , as a fan of the X series I must say I was really disappointed on this .
Mainly because they tried to fit all characters and a long and intricate story and character relationship in a 1:30 hour anime . There's only a blink of what is going on in the story , if you aren't familiar with it you won't understand anythiing at all and even if you do know the basics about the series you'll most likely be puzzled on how they shoved the story aside and turned this into a bizarre 'ending' for ... all characters showing what I believe to be the 'last match' between them and most characters end up dead one way or another . If you like the X series watch the TV and OAV instead .

Let me be clear: this review is NOT for the 24-episode series "X", or even for the short prequel that was released just prior to it. Both of those are excellent animes. This is for a full length movie version that was released even before that.

Frankly, it looks like a class project done by animation students. Seriously. If a friend of mine was studying animation, and showed it to me as part of his "demo reel," I would be impressed. But it's nowhere near the quality you would expect from a distributed anime made in the 90's.

Secondly, the ... story is highly altered. Things are changed or scrambled around. If you have seen the series, or read the manga, it's almost unrecognizable. (Imagine those animation students up at one AM, scrambling to finish the script before the deadline.) Even though I had watched and read both, it was hard to tell what was going on. For someone who wasn't familiar with the story, it would be utterly meaningless--and might turn them off from the X franchise.

Oddly, this movie retains many of the more gruesome elements of the manga. Though the series toned down much of the violence, this movie kept a lot (particularly memorable was a scene where a woman's body explodes from the inside out....oh, I did not need to see that...)

To be fair, there were a few sequences where the characters' body movements were animated very well (including the aforementioned violent scene)...but that's a gnat's eyelash compared to the overall show. As I was watching, I kept thinking of stopping, but then I'd continue watching, in the hope that there would be some redeeming quality. But there wasn't.

Conclusion: Don't watch. Don't waste your time. Go pick up the series instead. I hope this saves an hour and a half of your life.