Kimi wa Kanata

I wasn't initially gonna write a review for this, but since the naming convention of this film was the one that fancied my senses, I should at least give my 2 cents to say that this film made by one person: the infamous Yoshinobu Sena who did the "so bad, it's bad" Vampire Holmes, how does Kimi no na wa...ahem, sorry, Kimi no Kanata fare against many others who did the same thing?

In one word: NO. In more words: HELL NO. Please do not waste your time on this film just because the film title just cringes you on it being the vastly inferior product to the movies that inspired the creation of this wishy-washy movie.

Story and plot is superbly unoriginal and contrived, characters are hella one-note deficiencies for infodump and nothing else, sound is just poor too. The movie funnily enough, makes you feel like you're watching a Direct-to-TV film that's not even Disney-like quality with Digital Network Animation's (for short, DNA, which I'd bet that the 23 pairs of chromosomes are all connected in disparity) alright but poor to at best, decent visuals.

Save your 95 mins of time and watch 4-5 TV anime episodes or a film that'd make your time more useful. This is a piss-poor worthy cringe film.

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*Light spoilers ahead*

TLDR Below.

Imagine having Your Name combined with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, stretch it infinitely long, and mix 1 or 5 genres of your choice.

You get this mess. This excruciatingly long boring mess of just silly characters with melodrama that doesn't even fit the frame it is presenting.

I must stress there is nothing wrong with generic titles. Not everything has to be innovative of the past, a push of simplicity is beautiful anyway, but quality matters regardless. KimiKana doesn't even understand that basic fact. Story's out here having a bigger identity crisis than Bloom Into You, seriously, this turns into a Disney musical halfway through with some action sequences to follow on. The only important character here is Mio, you can forget anything to do with Arata, the dude doesn't even take at least half of the screen time, but apparently, he is a very important person (you can tell because he has superpowers). There are also people who you won't care about having relationship ties as if we've seen 20 episodes of this nonsense before. Just one big ambitious mess.

I have to give praise to the audiovisuals though, well, for the trailer, because that is one of the reasons I watched this. Everything in the movie does not correlate to the trailer. It is just basic plain budget-cutting stuff you see in mid-tier seasonals, which, doesn't mean it is bad, but doesn't mean it is unique or anything to praise. This movie probably has one of the few times where I can say something has "bad audio", in the sense that the use was bad not the actual sound that I could hear. I am going to have some very strong words with Sena Yoshinobu for allowing me to know some wild direction could even exist.

Anyways, this was too boring for me to enjoy, chances are it will be the same for you. I will give it praise in that the only thing I liked about this was the flamboyant moments and the wholesomeness that draws later on. Other than that, I don't recommend watching this one. Watch the two titles mentioned prior. Your Name for a good supernatural drama. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time for life lessons that are actually coherent.

TLDR: The movie is a mess of story and characters you don't really care about. Audiovisuals are mid. So everything adds up to be boring as hell but has some good flamboyant scenes.
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I have to say I was eager to watch KimiKana anyway. In addition to a hot trailer, the lack of talk from it was something that made me more interested in it, plus some said it was bad so I had to verify that myself. My curiosity is satisfied however and I have to say, even though it was just bad, I am happy to have seen it anyway.

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It's not bad but not too good either. It's a very chill movie that you watch some afternoon to pass the time and it's nice to see.

(+) The animation is decent and it feels cute and positive. They added some fantasy. The romance is also adorable but the reasons they have issues are for dumb reasons.

(-) The plot lacks so many extraordinary features, the characters are too generic, they tried to add something supernatural with some character but at the end it's irrelevant. Just a passing dream. Not intriguing, not exciting.

Even with the darkest and the most melancholic mood I think that I wouldn't be too attached to this. At least it has a passing score.

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<slight spoiler from the movie>

This movie is really interesting at first glance after I watched the trailer like a year ago and since it premiers this year, generally, it's not a bad of a movie for someone like me who's interested in fantasies or anything that's a slight dramatic but there's a side of me which I think the movie is utterly generic in terms of the plot where the character is lacking in development and everything that they're trying to depict which is 'supposedly' supernatural is just completely useless and the amount of 'Dramas and Fantasies' depicted in this movie was a bit interesting but at the same time it's pretty dumb and nothing is special, so general wise, it's just a typical romance with a mix of suspense and supernatural plot that doesn't need to exist in the first place.

Animation wise, probably the best thing in this movie. The studio did a decent job to represent a visual and the character's design somewhat changes in terms of the color scheme where we see some creativity in terms of the character and setting's colorful contrast and shading from Mio's real world when she's still alive and enjoying school and ordinary life with her friends TO Mio entering a different world where we can see some change and adjustment made when seeing the design of the overall setting and its characters provides a lot more brightness and less realistic looking to it.

When it comes to the sound, the OST were pretty great, I very much enjoyed the ED for this one and had to put it on loop on my spotify :^. Although there's this one off-putting OST when Mio sings one of them in the movie and why the bloody hell is she singing? I know it's her mom's favorite but at this point she's turning this movie into some kind of musical like the greatest showman rather than planning her way out to go back to her own world, honestly I had no clue what's going on at this point ;-;. In addition to the sound wise, this movie would've been better if there's a change for the voice actors because the voice actors who are voicing Arata and Mio are not fully experienced and their voice is somewhat unsettling for me, I think that having a really deep voice actor would depict a lot better for Arata as a character. Mio's voice actor is fine though but girl really just waste her voice during that one scene where she screamed and cried so loud.. It just felt worse than "You got a friend in me earrape version" plus kind of feel bad especially when this unfortunate movie execution is their first ever voice acting job (Well there could be more but that's what I've seen in their profile) and to be fair there are many other voice actors out there especially when it's their first time voice acting in a show, but at some time, they can make the show itself make or break depending on how they depict the characters or how the story is leading in the show.

Overall this movie is not the best out there but it's not the worst either and this really depends on people's personal enjoyment: if you don't want to waste your time to watch a movie with lack of plot then don't watch this but if you're into the following genre "Drama & Fantasy" then I can recommend this show..

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