Flag Director's Edition: Issenman no Kufura no Kiroku

I really hesitated between 6 and 7. Because in itself, the film has a lot of slack in the middle and the characters aren't developed enough for certain scenes to work emotionally (this is probably due to the fact that I've seen the film and not the series).

But what decided me was the idea the creators had of how to tell this story. This film is a found footage anime, and in this case they've completely embraced the idea from A to Z, so we have lots of different types of cameras through which we see the story: the narrator's and heroine's camera, the war ... machines' camera, Saeko's PC webcam, etc.... And each of these devices will have a different image treatment, adapted to that device: the webcam offers a form of rotoscoping that lags a little, the devices have the interface we're familiar with, the cameras on the machines are in inverted color, and so on...

So, technically, the found-footage aspect is magnificently rendered, but it also serves the theme of the role of information and the highlighting of war and dramatic situations in reality. Indeed, if we're talking about the role of these devices in providing a view of these situations, it makes sense to tell the story through them, and that's smart.

And they didn't go at it half-heartedly, because THE big narrative element of the film is only explained by a very, very clever staging technique that suggests the event through the staging without ever explicitly telling you what happened. I'll let you discover, but I think it's by far the best idea in the film.

In short, this is a truly original film, not in what it tells but rather in how it tells it, which just goes to show that it's not what you're going to tell and how original it is that's important, but the idea you come up with to tell it.