Hello World

This review contains minor spoilers, wherein I mainly elaborate on aspects of the story covered by the synopsis.

Simply put, Hello World is garbage. I could go into an endless stream of comical hyperbole in order to detail this, but I won't waste any time. If you're already familiar with how bad a Mado Nozaki story can be from Babylon or Seikaisuru Kado, don't be. This is much, much worse.

Hello World attempts to be a sci-fi romance flick, but unfortunately fails at the latter, and stumbles all over the former. The romance in this film is supposed to be assumed as true, both because our protagonist, ... Naomi Katagaki, gets roped into having a girlfriend by his future self, and also because it isn't actually developed in any real way aside from a montage of uninteresting events set to a forgettable J-pop song, sandwiched by scenes of cliched romantic tiptoeing. Right after confessing to his future self's girlfriend, Ruri Ichigyou, all romantic development stops and the rest of the film is fully dedicated to the sci-fi aspects of the story, which are just as bad. I'll avoid spoilers, but basically the worldbuilding is conveyed either through long, awkward, and cumbersome scenes of expository dialogue, or through vague, confusing, and contradictory "no actually" moments. This, I assume, is Nozaki's attempts at writing a clever narrative, but instead comes across as two stoner tabletop game DMs having an imagination battle. None of it is truly creative or original, it's just a collision of tropes established by other stories.

The characters are bland, trite, and have characteristics that are in opposition of each other. Naomi is introduced as the quiet, meek bookworm, but these aspects of his personality are quickly thrown away because they would hinder the plot progression, and he becomes able to process and adapt to reality shattering events with the same mental fortitude of an Elder Scrolls protagonist, and it's waved away because he's "familiar with sci-fi books", which should again clue you in on how creative the sci-fi aspects of this movie actually are. Ruri is introduced as the quiet, assertive bookworm. This is the part where I'd talk about her, but she actually doesn't do anything. She's like the flag in a game of Capture the Flag, she's an objective, not really a character. If I were to write out all of the dialogue she's given in the film, it probably wouldn't even fill up two pages. This is the main love interest in a romance movie. Future Naomi is introduced as the reliable chad doing everything for his love, but he spends the entire movie getting cucked, sometimes of his own volition, which is quite unfortunate, but also a little funny, because I don't think Nozaki was intentionally going for that. There's no particular reason to subject him to that, he's written to be a sympathetic character, so I can only assume it turned out that way as a result of incompetence.

I should also address the visuals. They're not good. The models are pre-shaded CG, meaning the shadows cast on them in scenes don't change naturally. A character will look out of a window and his face will be illuminated by the light streaming in from outside. Whether or not he is properly illuminated in this initial position is a different story, but the real disaster comes when he turns his head away from the window and his face remains fully illuminated. Only when his head is a full 180° away from the window do the shadows awkwardly pop in. This isn't something everyone will notice on a first watch, but once you do notice it, it becomes impossible to not notice, and remains distracting throughout the whole film. Aside from the shading issues, the CG models sometimes use the emotive faces found in a lot of 2D anime, and it always looks strange when they do. There's also various visual design choices which look absolutely hideous. For example, Naomi gets a glove that's an ultra-shiny teal. It looks absolutely disgusting because it has no visual cohesion with anything else in the entire movie, which mainly employs warm tones and then later an unsaturated aesthetic, and it's distracting in every scene that it's in. There's also lots of things with thin, rainbow colored stripes which look equally awful.

In summation, this movie is head-to-toe awful (with the exception of sound direction, which was unremarkable), and is a generally terrible experience, far beyond the acceptable range of bad in the phrase, "so bad it's entertaining". Watch at your own peril.

Spoilers-
The premise of a future mc helping out the current mc to get a girlfriend was an interesting concept. It would have been great if they kept the plot as beIng a romantic movie, as the first half of the movie was just that, awkward mc trying to get to know the female mc. I would have accepted if the movie did not elaborate much about the future mc so as to move the plot along.

However, when the movie tried to incorporate too much scientific manbo jambo ala inception in the second half, it became boring in the sense that things became too complicated. Virtual ... world within a virtual world trying to rectify things in yet another virtual world.

Plot should have stuck to mc in the opening, trying to win the heart of the female mc who is in a coma in the real world so that she can “wake up”.

This movie is an example of why Sci-fi and romance anime should never mix.
Romance part 8/10 science part 2/10

It's a meh. Story lacked conviction. Im very disappointed in how this came out, the concept was very interesting but they downplayed it so bad. I swear this concept has so much potential. Characters were bland, there wasnt nothing going on between the MC and his girl. It's hard to think that someone would die for their girlfriend of a month and spend 10 years working on how to extract the "consciousness" from recorded data. The only intriguing part is the data. The idea that it isn't time traveling had its kown originality to it, thus not having a paradox would be totally logical... Props ... to the concept, everything else sucked, thank you, goodbye.

Coming from someone who read the book, the book is meh and this film is horrible.

STORY 3/10
The story in the book is fine, it gets kinda convoluted and not making much sense near the end but then the entire premise doesn't logically follow to begin with. If you bought into the premise then the abstract and vague nature of the ending is not much of a stretch. It's a little silly but hopeful and imaginative. The issue is that the feel of the book is not communicated in this movie at all. I've seen people theory crafting and claiming this film's plot is elaborate and ... even comparing it to Inception, which is an insult to Inception. The film isn't more than what meets the eye; it just does a bad job at explaining things that the book explicitly stated. Outside of that it skips details that help you understand the significance of most of its emotional scenes and flat out feels like an uninspired and minimalist adaptation of scenes from the book.

ART 2/10
I've seen those with the gall to say the animation and CG is good or even impressive. It's not. The CG is laughably bad at times and the only interesting moment of animation comes from one more trippy sequence near the end. The character designs are boring, Ruri looks somewhat ok. All the characters have one facial expression that they have for pretty much all of the film. Hardly any of the personality or charm that scenes in the book had are expressed through the animation and it comes off feeling incredibly flat and unengaging.

SOUND 1/10
The sound gets a 1. It's fucking awful. The voice acting will put you to sleep. The insert songs are cheesy and dumb. You will be laughing at how hammy it comes across. The actress playing Ruri had a partial lisp for some reason. These are C list voice actors at best.

CHARACTER 3/10
The characters in the book are more distinctive then they are in the film. Again this is due in large part to flat adaptation and script that leaves out a lot of the details. I'd be willing to bet some people who haven't read the book wouldn't have caught on to how the main characters were meant to be portrayed because they simply aren't characterized in the film the way they are in the book.

ENJOYMENT 2/10
This film is boring. It's tacky, cheesy, it sucks and I didn't like watching it.

OVERALL
2/10

Worst peace of media I have ever consumed. It's an absolute waste of time, money and your will to live.

The story is okay in the first half, but after the main plotline starts to begin (when Naomi enters the "real" world) plotpoints are not longer explained and dialogue gets replaced with useless flashbacks and dreadful CGI cameramovement. All the other characters besides our main characters get no screentime, characterdevelopment or personality traits.

The visuals are a joke. During some scene they didn't even boder to draw textures over the bland 3D-modells and the movie looks like a bad version of Counterstrike:Source. The movie looks pretty ... when it wants to, but the horendes character modells drain every single drop of life and atmosphere out of this movie. Also sometimes there are very questionable colourfilters that make the movie look like an old instagram pic from an 11 year old girl.

The soundtrack per se isn't that bad, but way too loud sound effects stops the movie from even being half enjoiable for your ears.

The film overall just isn't worth watching. The story is way too overcomplicated and major plotpoints are just forgotten. Some consistent rules for worldbuilding are nowhere seen and stuff seems to happen just because. The characters are the best part even though the dialogues between them are as basic as it gets and you have no emotional attachment to them. The end is wayyy to long and destroys the few good moments the film had.

Art - It's CGI. The 2D portions are acceptable, the 3D portions are not. Nothing remarkable here.

Sound - meh

Story - Oh boy, where to start. Minor spoilers ahead.

The first half had me quite interested. Only, halfway through it devolves into your typical sci-fi story about time-travel with "quantum" in it. It's just horrible. "Quantum" here is an alias for totally weird, of course. Nothing in the middle makes any sense. And there is honestly nothing deep about it either. It's just a guy about to die suddenly getting a lot of powers. It's cliche and downright cheap. This is the stuff you get when you ... hold an author at gunpoint and ask them to write a sci-fi story with time-travel in 2 days.

Then you have the fight scenes.

CGI galore! You have fight scenes involving someone swinging around a book-on-a-chain(yeah, really), you have people jumping on cinnamon buns ... you get the idea. I wouldn't complain if this was something from Mario, but seriously, I cannot find any redeeming point about the fight scenes.

Characters - Now these are actually good. Only, they get stuck in a story that is an utter mess. I feel bad for them, really.

I can't recommend this movie to anyone. There is plenty of good science fiction around - read/watch that instead of this.