Back to 1stDecame4Danime's Profile 1stDecame4Danime's Profile

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 after and this movie is more or less a pointlessly redundant movie that overexplains 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 dump 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.

1/10 (where 5/10 is average)

Series review:
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?

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:
For example, intrigue: Why is the killer making swastikas, ying-yangs, and sewing hands and feet swapped on victims? No reason really, plot point dropped forever.
Why does she practically only drink water and seemingly blood? Surely she can't be human, is that blood-coffee? maybe she's a vampire, oh seems she's actually a doll, wait nevermind the author decided to go a different way, came up with the backstory for her arm and she's actually human and her inhuman diet will never be addressed again. wrighting 100.
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 get. Then after a few movies suddenly maguses and suddenly all puppet masters and nothing matters welcome to Fate (oh yeah, Nasu did write Fate, makes sense, wait is this just a Fate spinoff? Damn I've been tricked into watching Fate filler side stories haven't I?).

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 be 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 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. The finale of the series retcons in an antagonist as if he has been their friend all along even though it fills the series with a 4 year gap of plot holes and is dumb on the face of it and pointlessly meaningless if one tries to look any deeper. This series is a low effort unrevised draft.

Extreme Haagen-dazs ice cream product placement ads.

It's Madoka Magika if that show was even worse, dumbed down even further and made completely devoid of depth, just a bunch of meaningless imagery as a pointless backdrop to sci-fi bs action in meaningless cyber space.
The plot is exactly the generic series of nonsense slop you and every character involved assumed would happen from the start.
Luckily there's plenty of Cringe Girls Doing Cringe Things for them to montage at you SoL enjoyers. Vapid action sequences crammed in along with vapid SoL sequences, perfection, now that's a movie, finally a series of colors going by that you can clap to without feeling like you don't ... understand what they mean.

The antagonist was an ai god with absolute control over the entirety of their existence, thus everything that happens is pointless bs nonsense for no reason while the writers pretend like it's totally not, it's totally not just a series of random pointless bs so the movie can happen, the end.

The plot is an adaptation of the first book, The Borrowers by Mary Norton, in a 5 book series. If one wanted to see where the plot goes from where they leave at the end you could read the series to find out. Since the movie screenplay is by Miyazaki I would expect a lot of differences with the book being much more unfocused, boring, and lacking in thematic depth (the differences in the synopsis suggest as much).

The art/animation quality is top-notch and the movie has a decent amount of effort to give life to the world of the little people with plenty of charm ... and attention to detail with fun things like water physics at small scales and repurposing human items into their own scavenger culture and such. However, the mundane Earth setting does lack a certain charm in the absence of fantastical originality.
The plot is juvenile and severely lacking in substance as very little actually happens.
The antagonist lady is cartoonishly evil for no real reason, I shudder to think what she would do to someone suffering from dwarfism.
The mother's character is pretty much to be an annoying victim... which is annoying. The father is a generic stoic rock, which is serviceable but uninteresting.
Arrietty and the boy (but really all the characters) lack much of any character motivations. It's mostly just a SoL adventure where they're all just going about their day living life.
Arrietty barely (needlessly) uses the pin-sword she 'borrows' despite the amount of importance they pointlessly put on it. She even uses a little spatula tool more, fighting off a bug before finding the pin.
The whole borrowing vs stealing theme they're going for always catches me as very silly: 'We're the Borrowers. We don't steal, we just borrow!' (without ever giving back).
There are a few logical inconsistencies: there's a handlebar access hatch in the closet floor directly opening to the house of the borrowers that apparently no one in the entire current family let alone the housemaid noticed until we cut to the boy immediately having already found their location with it. (This access hatch implies that an older generation of house owners set up the borrower's house for them before both latter generations forgot/stopped trusting each other). They play very fast and loose with how audible some sounds would be and how much mass/strength would be needed to perform certain actions they do.
The ending is quite lacking as well since there was very little to wrap up in the first place.

The only notable differences between the (Disney American) English dub and sub:
Aside from some added little bits of dialogue and overall improvements to lines, the English dub censors a little political environmentalist speech the boy gives about how there are 7 billion humans on the planet and barely any traces of the little people and all the species he's read about that have died out, so they'll likely die out just as many other species have as mortality is the fate of all life which she wants to struggle to change which then ties into his own mortality fears. They censor it by replacing it with a repetitive 'fate is fate but maybe if we do something to change fate we can change fate and survive' dialogue to tie into his mortality fears.
The English dub also closes the open ending of the sub by adding in a little epilogue narration aside by the boy: "I never saw her again. But the following summer I returned, and was happy to hear the people in the house down the road talking about how many things in their home had gone... missing." Confirming that the boy lived through his surgery and similarly for Arrietty's family being fine.
The English dub also adds a hilariously generic modern summer romance pop song to end the movie added after the English version of the same song made for this movie.
There's also a UK (non-Disney) English dub, but it is overall woefully cold and lacking in many of the added charming little lines added by the Disney dub. Nonetheless both do some lines better than the other.

7/10 (where 5/10 is average)

This is very much a children's show. I'm not sure why someone labeled this Seinen (I suppose it's just a dumb consequence of how manga magazines categorize themselves as printing for a type of demographic whether it's the case or not for every series they run), they're quite lacking in the mental development category. I'd only recommend this for the mental equivalent of kids 15 and under.

The story centers on generic SoL episodic encounters hanging out with people: Haircut with a beautician. Shopping/eating/drinking in town. Hanging out with your new neighbors. Hanging out with your playwright sister. Renovating your house. Working construction. Childhood pet bird ... watching. Etc. There's no overarching point, there's no point to each either, it's just daily life SoL. It's not terrible quality dialogue, stories, characters. But it's not good either: a lot of pointless exposition dumps, 1-note noncharacters, nonstories. This is very much only for SoL enjoyers. Cringe Girls Doing Cringe Things.

The worldbuilding arbitrarily shifts sizes of most plants/animals, but it doesn't really use that for anything. It just makes it a slightly less fantastical fantasy world where all the unique races of beastmen/hobbits/giants/dragons/alien flora-fauna/etc. have all been replaced by ordinary boring earth plants/(sometimes talking)animals of altered sizes alongside shorter humans... and that doesn't really do anything in and of itself? The most it does with the varied sizes is natural consequences like varying clothing sizes from S-M-L-XL and laughably irrelevant comments like: "You must be this tall to ride-enter this town" "Wah, that's unfair", and "My tools are bigger because I'm bigger".

Other aspects of the worldbuilding follow the same vein of just being quirky for the sake of it: The spirits of treasured tools exist to just sort of be there to be referenced as being there a few times. The world's only necromancer who invented magic lightbulbs to animate skeletons through the input energy of sound is just sort of there to exist and have her slave skeletons do slave-labor occasionally and the energy is sound so music of the songstress can be pointlessly used as a tie-in. Everything about this worldbuilding is just a bunch of random ideas blended together with no actual purpose beyond pointlessly showcasing those quirky ideas. None of it actually has any narrative purpose. It's just quirky worldbuilding for the sake of being quirky.

A lot of it is weirdly reminiscent of Made in Abyss (to the point that I seriously question if it isn't the same mangaka under a different name). But childish and done terribly shallow in comparison. This ain't no Girls' Last Tour either (0 philosophy/depth). This is braindead SoL kiddy slop.

Some reviews are acting like there's romance here. There's absolutely no romance. This is a sterile kids show. There's a single (lampshade) joke about (misguidedly) shipping the roommate-friend MCs in the entire series.

Zero cinematography. Boring OP/ED visuals.

Watch the Ghibli film Arrietty instead if you want a story about the little people worth watching.

3/10 (where 5/10 is average)

100% serious vampire DBZ romance fanfiction. There, that's essentially what this is.

Now I can't fathom any fully developed mind who likes Twilight nor DBZ, so I am similarly unable to appreciate the combination of the two. But I can tell you it is supremely disappointing this movie wasn't written as a comedic parody because that could've been 10/10 instead of 1/10.

Hilarious part was when mc has a revolver going up against an op immortal tentacle vampire to get to the objectified macguffin noncharacter, and how does he overcome these seemingly impossible odds to choose whether or not to throw away humanity for that sweet puss-puss? ... We cut away. Time skip. He just does manage the impossible by doing it all off screen. How? Don't think about it. Mermaid nonromance edgy joke of an ending and we're out.

1/10 (where 5/10 is average)

This is a goofy kiddy franchise. I'm unsure what idiot thought it would be good for horror. It has way too much goofy fantasy going on causing severe tonal whiplash as it tries to be horror alongside an ecchi-shonen comedy(noncomedy).
This show is like that old Devil May Cry anime except with everything way way worse.
They're a generic group of supernatural private investigators stopping demon possessions and sending the demons back to hell episodically. The show then takes a jarring turn into a generic haunted house torturing victims with their guilt as if they repurposed some other story into it.
Generic pointless demon possession derangement murders followed ... by getting immediately stopped by the mc.
Generic videogame fire rod vampire pervy mc uses fireball to burn the demons after repeating his catchphrase x5.
Generic ice princess can't control her tsundere emotions leaking out ice powers.
Generic talking witch's hat.
Generic kappa pedo otaku assistant.

The art is higher budget than this show deserves, but visually uninteresting and never used to convey deeper meaning.

1/10 (where 5/10 is average)

1/3 of the manga is just the MCs repeating "Sis/Yume" "Bro/Utsutsu" back and forth (usually while eating each other).
Another 1/3 is just dumb/childish filler SoL stuff serving no purpose.
And the final 1/3 is boring violence and improvised 'plot' of random bs/exposition.
This manga is way too long, it is a huge waste of time/effort to read.

Genre: Psychological? there's nothing psychological about this. Suspense? there's no real attempt at meaningful suspense/mystery more than any other story, it has nothing beyond the 1-note plot. Horror? if mediocrely drawn violence of gore/body horror is horrifying to you then maybe preparing a fish in your kitchen is horror too?
This is ... a half-assed joke of a drama full of noncomedic relief joke noncharacters/asides, it's really just a vehicle for boring/repetitive guro/incest/pedo fetishism.

Side character side-stories:
mechanized cat Seto: noncharacter, serves no purpose in the story, ceases to exist after introduced early on.
All classmates/friends/teacher(+5?): noncharacters, serve no purpose, school background dropped early on yet randomly dragged into the narrative in pointless SoL asides throughout.
Doctor Bizen: noncharacter, serves no purpose, goes nowhere.
Hotoki: serves no purpose in the story beyond 1-note joke fanservice and boring backstory with Maria paralleling MCs' fetishized guro ouroboros.
MC's mother: noncharacter plot device, domestic abuse backstory for MCs, turned into 'please abuse me' fetish to make a joke of domestic abuse and parallel of MCs' fetishized guro ouroboros.
MC's father: pointless delinquent/yakuza psychopath for domestic abuse (fetishism) parallel of MCs' fetishized guro ouroboros.
MC's father's father: pointless noncharacter psychopath for domestic abuse fetishism parallel of MCs' fetishized guro ouroboros.
MC's father's 2 Masochist subordinates: noncharacters, pointless noncomedic relief of 'please abuse me' fetish asides to make a joke of domestic abuse and parallel of MCs' fetishized guro ouroboros.
None of them actually go anywhere, all of them are boring, the story would benefit from the removal of all of them... see Happy Sugar Life for this kind of story done properly.

Yuu: somehow introduced late as a super important main character that ends up pointlessly dragged along for half the story as nothing more than an exposition plot device and cuck fetish before being dropped from his own story after having never gained relevancy since redundant with MC.

Main characters:
Maria: noncharacter psychopath plot device antag, randomly dropped from the story at the end rather than having any actual character arc.
Yume: noncharacter little sister stereotype loli/brocon/guro/monster fetish device, does nothing, 0 agency, repetitive filler nondialogue.
MC: noncharacter siscon with rare anger management issues like daddy, pointless filler for the entire story, finally finishes the 1-note plot by doing the generic ouroboros nonending, the end.

Dialogue: extremely excessive. almost entirely brain-damaging filler and exposition dumps.
Art: mediocre quality, extremely boring nonvisuals, most it achieves is generally just random fleshy stuff often communicating nothing, ~3 alchemic symbolisms, the faces are all almost completely emotionless/nonexpressive making it extremely boring.
Plot: 1-note, boring.

2/10 (where 5/10 is average)

The manga is a complete story which this anime rushes through the beginning of cramming in most of the main scenes. None of what it introduces has any payoff as it ends abruptly as nothing more than manga-bait. The manga itself isn't much better having pretty much all of the same problems haphazardly overextending itself across a bunch of noncharacter non-plotlines while stretching out the 1-note plot.

There's nothing really in the anime that would spoil the manga since it's more or less the same random progression of events for what it does show. If you don't enjoy the anime, then you likely won't enjoy the ... manga either, the resolutions it provides are all boring and pointless.

This anime is an extremely boring 1-note waste of time nonstory. The generic nonimagery and gore is boring, low effort.
There's nothing confusing about this series, it just does nothing and has no depth. It draws out every nonscene of its 1-note nonstory of filler across 36 min of scenes and 12 min of OP/ED.

Plot: Siblings already infected with monster disease causing the girl to be a cannibal and the boy to be a regenerating meat source for her in a bunch of episode long (3min) boring cannibal torture porn scenes. The end.

There's also a pointless subplot of a witchy lady researching the disease, which goes literally nowhere except that she randomly impregnates herself with their sperm/egg for pointless ecchi before never having another scene.

There's also another pointless subplot of another researcher group of generic G-men who abduct them to do further boring torture porn via dissection before all the G-men die pointlessly from not reasonably preparing for exactly what they had to have expected to happen, nothing comes of this, cut back to more pointlessly gratuitous boring school life cannibal torture porn.

There's also a half-assed backstory of their parents being abusive for unexplained reasons (later shown in the manga) in which they already knew the daughter was a cannibal monster from before being born. This of course goes nowhere just flashing back to the same on-the-nose 'aboose!' 1-note over and over. But I suppose one can point out the boring 1-note cannibalistic monster siblings situation parallels the domestic abuse situation in a very pointlessly redundant way.

The OP was decent music.

I won't waste effort on a wall of text like some shills since this is a silly children's action movie of no depth.
Full 3d childish art style of silly caricatures doing silly things. At least 3D allows for decently fluid animation.

The characters are mostly action set-pieces, slapstick potty humor machines, cartoonishly evil, assholes, etc. It's very hard to like or care about any of them since we barely get to know any of them, and the MC is a childish gremlin interacting with a walking ha ha fat dumb person joke. The only nonsilly characters in the whole movie are MC's parent's and brother.

Borderline deliberately ... offensive tokenism of minorities in a movie that preaches "do not be biased (against your rulers and their nephews for their incompetence and destructive acts). Prejudice (against the elites) is bad." while going out of their way to uphold divinely approved prejudicial societies of both heaven and earth.

The world itself is generic Chinese mythology of everything magic bs and (un)enlightenment cultivation to curry enough favor to go from courtly aristocracy on earth to (identical) courtly aristocracy of gods in a divine realm. Lauding a culture of greed and supremacism.

The plot is willfully dumbly cartoonishly contrived. The few emotional moments are extremely hard to care about and almost exclusively just the MC (an asshole gremlin surrounded almost exclusively by assholes and silly idiots) crying because sad. The movie is effectively just a bunch of pointless action sequences that are drawn out with completely excisable filler and mostly accomplish nothing but fill time with boring weightless spectacle since cartoon logic is in effect so none of the impacts actually matter and everyone is completely fine. The end.

Also that narcissistically long string of premovie credits including an animation/production company advertising itself as a shitty performance the audience doesn't like followed by them mass electrocution murdering the audience as a threat to enjoy this movie or else was quite on-the-nose.

The english dub is pretty good, though the lines are mostly dumb jokes only a child could enjoy.
And yes, a child could enjoy this movie. There are however way too many far better movies out there with better ideals.

2/10 (where 5/10 is average)

If you've seen Kotoura-san this is better but not too different in broad story and (conflicting dramedy) themes.
The clashing ecchi-harem romcom and drama aspects force it into a nonserious halfassed story style that severely undermines its attempts at darker themes.
This claims to be horror but it really really isn't, it's a harem romcom with 1 dark drama ministory repeated twice.

A lot of the story is extremely on-the-nose parallelism of the 1-note mystery behind how the ghost girl died.
A ton of the show is just following the paranormal club to see a ghost rumor play out at the school as a vehicle for generic romcom virgin-kun ... and ghost girl to be embarrassed and repeat lovey-dovey cringe dialogue and artificial drama as soapy romance-bait alongside filler of dead horse beating repetitive slapstick/boob jokes.

The MC is the generic helpful noncharacter self-insert virgin cliche of all halfassed (harem) anime with absolutely no characterization to him beyond 1 noncharacter relative existing to contrive any plot relevance of the entire mystery of the series (her ghost backstory is irrelevant, all the side mysteries are irrelevant, they even make a dumb point to lampshade dialogue dump how pointless the answers to these mysteries are).

Many of the plot elements are pointlessly introduced and tossed aside: Another girl with the same name gets introduced as a foil for a single episode and is never brought up again. Gay-baiting of the 2 side girls for 1 scene and then 1 or 2 lines repeating it. Frankly neither of the 2 side girls ever have any real relevance to the story and are just there to pad the runtime with filler, they have no real characterization beyond their 1 notes (even the special ep had to make up another 1-note shrine-maiden chunibyo character trait to have much of anything for her to pretend to do) nor meaningful sideplots of their own let alone integration with the main plot beyond their role as generic romcom harem-bait.

The cinematography/visuals are sometimes pretty good but just as often terrible (such as silly traditional white ghost costume, directorial vomit of hallway moving squares/blocking portions of the screen) and vapid (upside down cross, JoJo refs, etc.).
And the ending is poorly done with a lot of word vomit cringe because it rarely knows how to do anything through subtlety when it can just use braindead dialogue dumps instead.

Overall it was still fairly enjoyable and could've been much more disappointing (like Kotoura-san).

Below average, 4/10 (where 5/10 is average).