Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo

Story: Much of a new genre story, Unexpected twists and turns. Adventurous for sure.
Characters: the respect, coordination, waiting, wanting, giving and spirited all are up for the whole movie.
Art: it's great that all those spiritual sensation made through the vision of the anime artist.
Fitting: as like most Comixwave productions involves cat as their privilege of honorable tradition hereby it shows the exact timing where it's the purpose of most of the main leads taking them to their destination throughout the journey. Love cats!!
Overall: Typically the music, the soul and the humility all go hand on hand with this anime movie, it ... may seem to lag but worth to give it a go and to wander upon :)

I think this is perhaps the lightest, featheriest 5 I've given a film. It's like on the cusp between a 4 and 5. The reasoning for this is that the quality gap between the writing and the art of this film is massive. The OST is georgous, perhaps the best from Tenmon we've ever seen. However, the story is incredibly tedious and monotonous with Shikai attempting to go full Studio Ghibli. On one hand it's a bit nice that each of his earlier films did not turn out to be beta versions of Kimi No Na Wa, on the other hand this seems kinda worse ... in several aspect. This film surprisingly doesn't do that bad at creating a fantasy-type world. The visuals and music especially are phenominal. You can tell here Shinkai not only knows how to draw people finally but the visuals are on par with Kimi No Na Wa and Tenki No Ko with how show-stoppingly beautiful they are. However, the pacing is painfully slow. This is Shinkai's second longest film, only behind Suzume. Yet, at least with Suzume it felt like the plot was progressing naturally throughout its runtime. With this it seems like the plot just mianders around in one of the most boring ways possible. The first 30 minutes or so are quite compelling but once our protagonist enters the "fantasy world" it turns into an absolute snooze fest. I feel like without the stunning visuals or banger music to keep me engaged I would've probably fallen asleep. On the bright side, a lot of the visuals and fantasy-tropes that come from this movie end up serving as the perfect setup for Kimi No Na Wa. In a way, this movie had to flop with its fantasy elements in order for his later works to be as phenominal as they are. I guess other examples of this could be Cherry Bomb for Tyler Okonma or 808s for Kanye West (I can't think of any movie/anime related examples I'm sorry). But those pieces of media had to flop to lead to something much better down the road, and this is just another example. All and all, there are certainly quite a few elements from this film that I enjoy, but I do not have the patience to slog through this one again.

To Any Aspiring Anime Film Directors Out There, please do not try to recreate Spirited Away. You will not be able to surpass it.

Lots of parts are very reminiscent of Laputa Castle in the Sky but this is far worse, really wastes 2 hours of screen time on barely anything. It's more like Shuna's Journey or The Boy and the Heron or The Cat Returns, hell even like Paradise Island or Atlantis or any other of a million stories just like it that journey into the mcguffin fantasy land to do the mcguffin thing. The problem is this doesn't do anything with it. It's a generic journey through the Underworld to save the dead lover noncharacter, and even lampshades itself as such.
I'm confused why they decided to do ... such a 1-note story stretched over so much nothing that it develops neither characters nor much of anything beyond a bunch of pointless wandering, exposition, and chases, while simultaneously having almost nothing to say about anything beyond "nature is in fact what nature is."

It's not good. The scenes themselves are full of overexaggerated artificial feeling almost incessantly. The dub was poorly acted. The dialogue itself was terrible, mostly mindless exposition and self-narration and more grating artificiality.
The MC's motivations were nonsense, she constantly just follows everyone else around like a lost puppy before self-narrating that actually her character motivation is that she's lonely which is why she left her school friends and mother behind to go be alone listening to a radio in the mountains before following practical strangers into the Underworld to do whatever they want.

There are a lot of pointless side elements like the truth about the MC's father, or the fridge male who gets pointlessly replaced by his brother, or the background of a secret organization among other human organizations from history trying to pilfer the other world for knowledge (despite that they're simple medieval farmers and apparently none of the fantastical stuff had any effect on the world), or the gatekeepers (who are nothing more than plot devices and a hamfisted "pollution is bad" line), or the monster humanoids who can't eat the MC because endless plot armor... it's all pointless. None of it goes anywhere, none of it is meaningfully connected, it's just an uninspired series of events with decent animation quality much like the Earthsea anime movie. Even the radio voices referenced in the title in English have pretty much no relevance to the story itself, and the Japanese title means Children Who Chase Stars? There are 4 (really 3) children in this story and they mostly have barely any character nor importance to the plot and I could not for the life of me tell you why this movie is named the way it is in either language because their is only 1 child who barely happens to follow the voices mostly because an adult happened to lead her coincidentally that way and the voices turn out to be mostly irrelevant and dropped. And I guess because there are no stars in the magical Underworld it could be referencing the 1 child noncharacter fridge boy who wanted to see the outerworld where there are stars... which also has practically nothing to do with the movie.

3/10 (where 5/10 is average)