Love Live! The School Idol Movie

Love Live took off great with the brilliant 1st season, started to stumble with the 2nd, and lands in a real belly flop in this movie. I'm really quite sad to see it end this way.

What got me hooked from the start of the 1st season was the CG song/dance performances, and this movie lacks most of that. There are some CG left in the movie that looks cool but mostly it is just "regular" animation. The graphics are good, don't get me wrong, but I really liked that kind of 3D choreography with vividly moving camera angles that the first season brought.

Sadly I didn't ... like the music either. The first two seasons had some ups and downs regarding song quality, but in this movie, none of them hooked me. At least the voice acting is alright as always.

The plot is overly simple, un-dramatic and feels mostly like an afterthought. Half of the movie is just cute but non-funny comedy, the other half is cute but rushed, non-dramatic drama. The characters that carried a big part of the two previous seasons don't get much time to bloom, and the time they do get is mostly wasted on shallow "comedy". There really are too many members of Muse; sure they all have different personalities and all, but at least some of them could have been trashed to make room for the rest.

At least it looks good. NYC really gets a fair treatment and the girls are as alive and well designed as ever.

The only thing I actually enjoyed was Hanoka's "new acquaintance", a really beautiful symbolism that could have made a bittersweet ending even more sweet (Not that the ending actually WAS bittersweet, but I guess that's the direction they were aiming).