Umibe no Étranger

The movie is an amazing adaptation of a very touching story.
Umibe no etranger is a very calm, gently paced story, about lgbtq hardships in a non accepting society, self hate and the deep void of not being able to have someone you can call yours.
The story follows the love story of two boys with very different backgrounds and personalities, and when opposits attract, they can also create lots of arguments and misunderstandings.
Shun is a very complex main character, filled with flaws yet very fascinating in my opinion. His behavior is bad, an attitude filled with sarcasm to hide his most intimate emotions; loneliness and ... guilt of being different since his youngest age.
Mio, on the other side is much less worried of the hardships that come with being in a gay relationship. He's younger, free, less mature yet very hopeful.
Umibe no Etranger was very cute, with a climax scene that was absolutely fitting for the build up of hidden loneliness Shun felt for his entire life. Anyways, bring your tissues just in case! You're in for an emotional ride.
My only complaint would be about the lack of bg music!

i... really don't know how to give this a rating. i highly enjoyed it, and i understood it even though i knew nothing about the source material. in a vacuum, i'd consider it a short and sweet film about a complicated romance, with realistic depictions of homophobia. and to be fair, that's how i did view it at first.

but.

there is a 7-year age gap between the two main characters. they meet when they are 17 and 24 respectively, and most of the movie takes place when mio is 20 and shun is 27. normally, i don't care about age gaps as long as they're consenting ... adults and one isn't literally old enough to be their parent, but at an age that young? really?

in my defense, its art style as well as the way the characters act does not convey that age difference at all. it mentions mio is in high school at the beginning, and shun has already graduated, but you'd think that shun was just a year above him or something.

overall, the film itself is quite sweet, but finding out about that age difference afterwards definitely spoiled any positive feelings i had towards it.

the animation is amazing, though.

I don't know the source material, but I do know it's short. No matter its quality, this seems like a poor adaptation. I'm not exactly sure how Umibe no Étranger came into being in the first place, but whoever steered the wheel on its production course either had a limited budget, or conceived this as a series of shorts initially, because the story feels chopped into rather disjointed parts that have clumsily been put together. The plot itself is nothing to write home about, so when you further ruin a pretty simple, straightforward love story by ruining its pace, omitting its conclusion, and rushing through ... its time skip, everything else, no matter how beautiful the movie looks, ends up suffering because of it. The most satisfying part of this movie is without a doubt how it looks and how its animated, but when I turn out to be more interested in seeing more shots of cats cuddling than I am in seeing the romantic plot pan out, you know you're doing something wrong.

To add an absolute insult to injury, considering this anime deals with openly gay people, the conversation close to the end between our main characters shoves in some dialogue that feels truly insulting to anyone gay: the exchange implies that being gay is not alright because "gay sex is disgusting" (which is presented as a hurdle that true love conquers over, I guess??), and that it's ok to love a man as long as it's emotional only, while you are in fact attracted to women. Take from that what you will, but it left ME feeling disgusted, and not because "gay sex bad".

All in all, an unforgettable experience for all the wrong reasons. At least it's pretty and has a lot of cute cuddly cats, which is why you should watch it precisely once, if at all.