Kara no Kyoukai Movie 4: Garan no Dou

Like the other films, this film emphasize heavily on character development while filling in questions for the viewers who had already seen the previous films. This film focuses mainly on Shiki and her abilities' origin, etc.

As usual, the visuals are amazing as always. The music and sounds use are mostly used before by the previous films but since they are suiting I am personally not going to complain about it.

As mentioned, this film focuses on character development, and it excels at portraying out the details of each character. Though most of the time it showcases character development on Shiki, Mikiya and Touko isn't left out ... either too.

Honestly I was disappointed in the lack of action involved but I still personally enjoyed this film since it filled up the questions.

This is part 4 of the KnK movie series
This movie is basically one big character development but I still enjoyed this movie.

(There will be some SPOILERS in my review)

[Story]: (8/10)
The story of KnK 4 now takes place 2 months before the events of the 1st KnK and immediately after the events of the 2nd movie. I was actually hoping for the 4th movie to take place after the events of the 1st KnK but I'm glad they didn't.
After Shiki got involved in a traffic accident, she spent 2 years in a coma and what's worse is she now has an amnesia. She is visited ... by a redheaded girl named Aozaki, a magus and works for a company called Garan no Dou.
Like I said above, I was hoping for the 4th KnK to move on past KnK 1 but I'm glad they didn't. This pretty much shows what happened to Shiki after she woke up from a coma after being involved in an accident 2 years ago. They showed us at the end of KnK 2 that she was being transported to the hospital but we didn't really know what exactly happened to her. The story tells us why and how Shiki got hurt. Not only that, it also shows us how and why Mikiya is working for Touko. In short, the story just tells us more about the main characters and why they are at that situation now which is not a bad thing.
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[Art/Animation]: (10/10)
The Animation is exactly the same as the previous 3 movies which is already a perfect and visually stunning animation.
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[Sound]: (9/10)
If my ears aren't broken, the soundtrack is exactly the same as the previous 3 movies. They were already great to begin with so I'm not going to complain that they re-used background themes. Another new ED theme song is used for this movie called "Aria" by Kalafina. In my opinion, it's a good song but not better than the ED used in 1st and 2nd movie.
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[Characters]: (9/10) (SPOILERS)
No new characters were introduced as the focus of this movie is the development of the main characters. The movie shows us that Mikiya has been visiting Shiki for the past 2 years, non-stop. He truly has feelings for Shiki and still does. Hell, even the nurses know him by now because he kept visiting the hospital. We also get to learn more about Mikiya, Shiki and Touko. I want to focus first on Mikiya. We learn that Mikiya didn't graduate college, had a fight with his parents and now lives alone and works for a dead end job (looks like a dead end job to me). Now focusing on Shiki, we learn that she now has an amnesia after waking up from an accident which means she doesn't remember mostly everything including the day of the accident. She somehow remembers the face of Mikiya but not his name though. We also learn more about her magic eye and how her second personality is now gone. Finally, focusing on Touko. The movie didn't really tell us anything about her that much in the previous 3 movies so I didn't find her an interesting character. Now, she seems like an interesting character to me. The movie shows us that she's a freaking Magus. That explains why she has knowledge to mysterious things that's going on around her. It also shows us what Touko is really capable of after they showed us the battle scene at the near-end of the movie. I'm starting to like these main characters.
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[Enjoyment]: (8/10)
This movie is just a big character development for 3 of the main characters but I still enjoyed it. It's giving us more reasons on why I should give a crap about these characters. That last battle scene was quite rewarding, showing us what Touko is capable of.
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[OVERALL]: (8.5/10)
The 4th movie didn't really go past the events of KnK 1 but this was still a great movie to watch. Learning more about the main characters is quite interesting. People tell me that the 5th movie will be a lot better than the previous 4 so I guess I'll be watching the 5th movie soon.

This movie comes 2nd chronologically in the series. But of course, you've been gaslit into watching it 4th for pointless overcomplication so you've already been spoiled on what happens afterwards and this movie is more or less pointlessly redundant, overexplaining what you already know about Shiki by moving her setpiece into where it will've needed to be for the later chronologies.

Since this is a redundant transitional movie, it stretches very little story of moving 1 setpiece into place into a great big nothingburger of 45 mins crammed full of overindulgent directorial vomit and masturbatory filler. At the very least we can congratulate it on finally ... managing a little bit of character work even if it is accomplished largely through boring narrated/exposition-dumped brain-damaging dialogue.
Finally, they stick the landing with a big dumb action climax for all those shonentypes to clap at. Genius. Get ready to wait several movies before you actually find out the laughably dumb and pointless excuse for plot that was deliberately skipped over before the start of this movie. Now that's just good wrighting.

The 1st 4 movies were pointlessly rearranged out of chronological order in the same way as the source material (thereafter is chronological). You'll find online (much like with any series) fanboys blindly recommend watching it in the order it was released. They will give no actual valid justification for this achronology however. So allow me: The author published each individual chapter online coming up with it as they went and ended up writing prequel chapters and sequel chapters and such off the cuff merely because that's the order they came up with it. Achronology adds absolutely nothing to these movies beyond the pointless achronology itself: pointless convolution of simple linear storytelling, not even adding timeline mystery as it literally tells you the dates for each movie and it's readily apparent which comes before which. What it does do is detract from the story: It shows the chronological last of the 4 1st, thus spoiling your experience of the 3 movies thereafter because all of them are murder-oriented, removing all suspense of whether or not many of the exact same characters will die when we now already know that they won't, they have plot armor to live because they need to be there for the later chronology. They made a lame story slightly worse by recommending the release order. If you want to watch this in the release order, go ahead and watch the HP movies in a random order for the exact same result because achronology is just inherently better and aren't you special? (god I'm getting Vietnam flashbacks of Peach Boy Riverside)

Each movie in this series follows the main cast involved in another supernatural murder mystery scenario of the week for them to investigate/resolve via exposition dump nonmystery rather than piecing together evidence alongside the audience and often just completely removing all suspense by showing us the murderer and their circumstances from the start.
Both each movie internally and all the movies taken as a whole can be described as a dumb series of random asspulls strung together. Every aspect of it is making itself up as it goes. You can pretty much watch the author coming up with the characters in real-time from blank edgy cardboard nothings to suddenly dumping exposition backstories and that's about as far as they ever get.

Despite being ostensibly 'dark fantasy', while it deals with dark/mature themes this isn't horror, just 20% violence/gore between 80% filler. Rather than horror it's mature action, and whatever attempts it makes to be dark come across as laughably edgy and usually conveyed through idiotic shonen villain monologuing (think Angels of Death taking itself completely seriously).

The dialogue is nearly 100% filler/exposition in addition to frequent poor translation/nonsense dialogue.

Barely any actual cinematography or even interesting shots. The best it manages is a bunch of superficial nothings like dead body with blood, oOoOo blood, spoOoOoky and 1 Elfen Lied gore ripoff character who the series just never has show up again? But I guess this shallow filler counts as deep to some people.

The MC is a noncharacter simp with almost no backstory and hardly any relevance to the series. most everyone else actually goes out and does stuff while he kinda just shows up to talk and occasionally participate by simping for girls almost certainly because he's been written as a generic MC self-insert for a VN nonromance harem builder with all the hentai scenes left out. He's a pencil-pushing desk warmer the girls immediately fall for who has been written out of the story with dumb excuses like being comatose and going off for weeks to learn to drive and the story taking place elsewhere only to briefly call him up on the phone to say hello. Let alone making a different character MC, you know your story is bad when your MC of all people would've been better off cut from the entire series.

They frequently skip entire scenes that are actually part of the plot and just sort of act like they haven't, as if they were supposed to be there but were simply cut for pointless ambiguity because it apparently just isn't interested in telling the story, as if it is rushing through the plot in order to cram in as much cost-saving filler as it can. This series is a low effort unrevised draft.

1/10 (where 5/10 is average)