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NOTE: THIS REVIEW HAS SPOILERS SO PLEASE AVOID READING THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE ANIME

I hate that I’ll dig into Pompo The Cinephile (or Eiga Daisuki Pompo-san in Japanese) as much as I will for the rest of the review because you can clearly tell the people making this movie were truly passionate about it, but ultimately the movie simply has a lot of problems that cannot be simply ignored. Pompo the Cinephile is a movie that can be best described as full of ambitions and ideas, but ultimately fails in fully fleshing out those ideas because of how aggressively underwhelming it is in ... regards to its execution.

The movie is about Gene Fini, the assistant of Joelle Davidovich Pomponette (Pompo-san), a film producer at the movie capital "Nyallywood'' who is given the task to direct a film based on a script written by her.

There are some interesting stylistic choices under its toolbelt, like scene transitions, echoing the way the late Satoshi Kon would bleed different scenes together with an amazing sense of flow. The way it visualizes the main character Gene Fini’s inner thoughts whenever he’s in his creative zone was a particular treat.
The visual parallels created between Gene’s personal struggles with finding his own voice in the film and the protagonist of Meister, the film Gene is Directing and Editing were interesting at some times but at other times didn’t have the connective tissue to connect the struggles of the two together, but it trying to do that was admirable.
(Disclaimer: The following is something that’s a personal pet peeve of mine, and because of that I’m not deducting any points for it but I do want to address it)The movie does this one thing that I don't really like in some modern anime where they have these long sweeping one-shots that move around the 3D Background without any sort of motivated movement in mind. It's fine when something like AOT does it because they use that to emphasize the momentum and the speed of the characters when they're using it for their 3D Maneuvering gear, it does not fit when it's just a shot of an opera performing, there are so many ways to capture the grandiosity of the opera without doing this showy camera move that does nothing but distract the viewer.

Popo the Cinephile’s character work is generally lackluster, Gene is the only character that is actually somewhat fleshed out. They introduce him as a person with problems regarding his voice as an artist and ambitions as a filmmaker, and how he finds solace in films due to being an outcast. The parts that showed his inner thought process whenever he’s editing are easily the best parts of the movie because those are the only parts in which Gene really shines through as a living breathing character.
Pompo, the titular character (though not the main one, funnily enough) is only really there to serve as a catalyst to all of the other characters’ arcs in the story.
This movie has a weird problem with characters wherein it introduces someone, establishes an arc for them and then:
A. just never doing anything with it
B.rushing it so quickly that you never really see said character progress throughout.
For example, the character Natalie's introduced early into the movie. Her arc is about having the confidence to perform and actually landing a role, and they resolve all of that in the first act by way of montage after which she gets the lead role in Pompo’s new film.
Alan Gardner is easily the weakest of the core cast. He is introduced as someone having a history with Gene who happens to conveniently work at Nyallywood Bank, the bank that ultimately helped fund Gene’s movie after a very contrived conflict introduced at the end of the second act. It feels like they introduce this character purely to be someone who helps solve said conflict regarding the funding of Gene’s film (who also receives a Deus ex machina too in the form of Nyallywood Bank’s CEO). They try to flesh out Alan by explaining his conflicts in a single throwaway line but it does little to help.

The movie’s core theme is about trying to ultimately live to one’s own ambitions. The problem is that it does little to really delve into its core theme and everything surrounding it. A lot of the core problems of the movie exist because the length of the movie that they (the filmmakers) set for themselves to serve what they thought would be a cool trick (a topic that is discussed inside the movie and is also one of the conflicts presented in a conversation with Gene and Popo), but what it ends up doing is that it leaves the movie no room to really truly get into the themes and ideas it wants to discuss, leading to it rushing through everything and never focusing on anything. The movie also pretty much forgets to have a conflict in the main story so they shove a few just before the third act and resolve them almost immediately.
I also personally feel like this haphazard way of immediately resolving conflicts leads to it having a very problematic message at the end. Gene, due to overworking himself during the editing phase which leads to him suffering from anemia. Personally speaking, they could have taken it to an interesting direction and have an interesting message regarding overworking in relation to one’s passion. What the movie does instead is that it lets Gene’s reckless behavior be ultimately rewarded at the end by him escaping the hospital he’s been sent to rest and him finishing the film to great critical and commercial praise. This sends the message to the viewer that one’s ambitions serve greater precedence than their own health and wellbeing which is problematic and irresponsible to promote.

Overall, Pompo the Cinephile had the potential to be a really interesting and possibly introspective movie about personal ambitions and filmmaking, but the runtime ultimately works to its detriment by delivering a very shallow final product. Imagining what it could have been is ultimately more infuriating and disappointing than the actual movie. It’s not the worst thing you will ever see, because the few virtues it has are the only things carrying the movie, but there are definitely much better movies and anime out there tackling similar themes.