Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya Movie: Licht - Namae no Nai Shoujo

When the credits finished their roll, my first thought was "Prisma is BACK" (at least from a production standpoint). As a point of reference, I gave Oath Made Under the Snow an 8/10, but upon reexamination, I'd honestly have to knock it down to a 7 due to my woes with the animation. This new film I enjoyed more, and for almost the opposite reason as that one.

While Oath had a the production reach its lowest point, which was already slipping in the TV series of 3rei, the story arc of Shirou was great. On the flip side, this is the point in 3rei ... I feel the plot starts to get away with itself BUT they brought back the hype animation we hadn't seen since season 3, something akin to the battle with corrupt Gilgamesh.

On the story front, this film focuses mainly on Beatrice and Julian's motivations, two characters I've never really cared much for. Their reasons and back story's are fine enough, they're serviceable, but when we already finished a season with a giant battle with Julian at an alter with a giant cube and tentacle esque dodging, if feels so strange to take a break and return to the same scene for another climax. This is something that's always bothered me with 3rei and obviously carries over to the film. Also the decline to almost non-existent fanservice in 3rei (besides costumes) continues. While the drought may turn with BD shorts, you'll find nothing here in the theatrical version. Fingers crossed for the BD!

Moving onto the animation, this is where the film shines and begins to reclaim some of the hype that's felt lost from the last two productions. There's lots of embellished fights, fight animation and facial animation used liberally. They unfortunately also use some 3d models at times but switch it up between the 2 styles that it always stays exciting. They also do a good job of using a cg model but gradually turning it into a 2d model as it comes closer to the screen, an effect I really appreciate. There is a bizarre sequence during the Beatrice/Illya fight where a heavy filter is used which might have been to represent Medusa's eyes, but to me it seemed like a very strange way to obscure the CG models during an extended sequence. Overall the battles are still very excited and pack a ton of oomph we haven't seen in a long time. The climax between Julian and Illya uses a lot of CG similar to the Giant Gil monster fought in season 3 but is offset by great cuts of 2d animation from Illya. This battle is also an excellent example of where the soundtrack hits right, with a humming vocal track that gives the perfect heroic Prisma climax we know and love.

Overall, meh story but fun film for me. I was very excited leaving the theatre as my expectations had dropped significantly after their last two efforts. If this leg of the story had maintained the quality of Oath, it would have been a disaster. Fortunately, they rekindled some of that Prisma magic, bringing in the fun, creative and surprising good fight animation I had so enjoyed from their previous works.

I hate to say this because Kaleid for me is at the moment one of my favorite ongoing Type-Moon series, the manga that is, and the arc that the movie adapts is one of my favorite ones , it has so much action, nuance, character development and great visuals there, but the movie lacks almost all of them.

Visually it isn't good, sometimes it looks really good but mostly not, the story and characters are too rushed, and it's sad because Kaleid has solid adaptations overall, they handled Oath Under Snow greatly, mostly because it was an arc with around 10 chapters, this movie adapts ... an arc of essentially double or triple the size of the last one, and you can really feel that after the first minutes of it.

They did handle the last minutes of the movie much better than the first ones, though again, the manga is the better version by far.

As a fan of this series I am very disappointed in it. I'm writing this review because there doesn't seem to be a negative review here as far as I can see.

The story was strong although it cut out some very important parts from the manga, effectively skipping the nuance in the fights and in the characterisation. There are some great parallels in the characters.

The soundtrack sucked, it was mixed poorly and the songs never matched up with the fights. Often times I would find myself questioning why a song was playing. (or a lack of it) I really wouldn't be surprised if the sound ... director was out of a job after this travesty. The ending song was good though.

The fight animations felt excruciatingly lacklustre: zoomed in CG combat is a cardinal sin, random distant zoom outs to the point where you can hardly see the action, wonky framerates in places. There is a LOT of needless CG animated which was awful to look at. They also overused an awful particle effect with lots of moving black particles which didn't look good the first time they used it, let alone the next 30 times. I have literally no idea who thought it was a good idea.

The voice acting was practically the only saving grace of this floundering failure of an adaptation. Some highlights are Kugimiya Rie who kills it as Beatrice; Kadowaki Mai who does a fantastic job as Illya as per usual; and Hanae Natsuki who really managed to share the pain of being Julian.

In conclusion, this movie is heavily carried by its source material and voice actors. Most of the successes can be attributed to its origin manga which is genuinely good; the only thing the adaptation really feels like it added were the voices which is, however, a shallow victory considering the things that were lost. I really wanted it to be better, but alas, it wasn't.