Nijiiro Hotaru: Eien no Natsuyasumi

um...this surprisingly didn't make any sense to me.
I usually love this kind of movies, but this is probably the biggest disappointment I have experienced in a ghibli type of story.

The first half of the movie is really sweet. Some people might not like the art so much, but for me it was okay. I can stand any style of art as long as the story and characters are good. The music too is pretty nice at the beginning.
But during somewhere in the middle, things just went downhill pretty rapidly. I don't even know how to describe that last half of the movie. The easiest way ... to start would be from the ending. That grandiose wrap-up was uncalled for. The music too only made things worse. It's like, you start with debussy and end with wagner. Even musically, it didn't make sense. Now going back a little in time, there was this weirdly placed time skip and total lack of explanation for what happened after the boy went back to his own time. Maybe the staff who worked on this didn't think it was necessary to explain it, but from my point of view, the gap left me pretty speechless. I haven't seen a worse executed progression and buildup of events.
The story too is really meaningless. I don't like stories with forced meanings either, but I hate being left with nothing to feel. Overall, I think what made me think the movie is a joke is the ending. It's really bad. I even like soap operas sometimes, but this kind of ending and music, it makes me cringe.

I'm a big studio ghibli fan and think every one of their work is brilliant. I'm very biased about this type of movies, but seriously, it disappointed me too much.