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This is my first review on this site so I'm going to keep it rather short and brief. The review is spoiler free, so feel free to read it even before watching.

I'll start with a small notice – I feel like there are 2 major approaches to this movie and I'm going to describe it from approach which I took, but I also can understand why a lot of people will probably disagree with my point of view. So yeah, you can obviously watch it as all other movies and rate it based on same criterias, but hey! This one has some cool origin, so ... I think this is the one thing thats worth to know!

Lets start with a small backstory – the movie itself is based on the quite old live action movie from 1988 (which is based on the novel written by Osamu Soda) and it tries to refresh concept while maintaining the same vibes and fundamental thesis as the novel and live action movie. It should be noted as well that premise of the story should be treated with a grain of salt – there are obviously some plot holes and thinking like „why these kids aren't even thinking about the consequences of their actions” is not entirely wrong way of thinking, but its also unfitting for these kind of movies. A lot of decisions in the show can be perceived as taken out of reality but it fits into the atmosphere of the original novel and its reception for those old times. Young japanese people in 80s were very calm and innocent, so the novel and live action of this highlighted kinda unknown and unfamiliar image to them.

Okey, so it wasn't a short introduction but let's move on. I know that a lot of reviewers like to cut the review into a smaller segments like “Plot” or “Characters”, but I feel like all these things are connected so tighly that it doesn't make sense to do this, so I'll just talk about it in my own style.

The whole of the story is quite simple – it follows a bunch of kids (okey, highschoolers, but “kids” is more relevant, taking into account the context and story), not necessarily friends, that decides to start a small revolution against adults. The kids-adults interactions are strongly highlighted cause the whole point of story is to showcase some differerences in point of view between kids and adults and to (obviously!) make the thesis that becoming adult is not necessarily something good and desirable. The group barricades themselves in an abandoned factory and begins to fight not only with adult tyranny, but also with its own past and feelings so they won't end up in the same way as bad adults. The important character in this fight against own weaknesses is thai child which the characters decides to protect. The character development here is not that constant and stable as you may know from new movies – it takes more gradual approach, giving us a bunch of new informations from time to time, which marks the next turning points of the story. This character development is best manifested through responses and behaviour of characters – how they approach and react to these not necessarily positive external factors, how they interact with each other and how they want to fit themselves in this group. Considering the length of the film and the size of the group , they did a really good job of sketching the profiles of each character and describing them.

Another important point is the presentation of an adult point of view along with how they approach the current problem and how to deal with it. There are quite few important adult characters here and and each of them complements the adult image depicted by movie. Whats noteworthy is that the family interactions are also considered here as kid-adult interaction which deepens the outlined differences of both 'worlds'.

Personally speaking, I found all these characters likeable and I was able to become familiar with most of them – each of them shows different personality, although they are well known in anime industry, but I don't think that it's bad in itself. The movie contains several unexpected plot twists (one of them should be used A LOT more in the anime overall but hey, what do I expect...) which were particularly interesting, but I found myself very captivated how well they changed the atmosphere between comedy and drama parts. This movie even had a small reference to live action movie, it felt good to catch this reference!

The technical part of the review is not something that I'm fond of, but I'm going to praise the seiyuu for how well they showed the characters emotion. Soundtrack was also fitting for this show. Art obviously wasn't Shinkai-tier, but the characters designs, backgrounds and details were drawn nicely and neatly.

Well, thanks if you made it to the very end of this review and I hope that I was able to provide you some good backstory information about this movie and how this rather specific movie should be approached in my opinion. Of course you can rate it based on your own criterias and whatever you want, but I think that its cool to know the origin of the show and take this into consideration!