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This film made me cry. Not just tear up, but cry. Properly sob. I will endeavour to talk about this film more, but I think this has to be put up-front because it has NEVER happened to me before. I mean never. This is why I have to give it the score I've given it, because I cannot plausibly have a film hit me on an emotional level I have never experienced before and give it anything else. It hit VERY close to home for me, and I will talk a bit (as impersonally as I can) about why, but that emotional response comes above ... everything else to me.

So, Maquia. Written and, for the first time in her career, directed by Mari Okada, I was always primed to connect with this. I have spoken many times about my admiration for her as a writer, and this sort of proves a lot of the reasons why I love her so much.
On the direction level, her new endeavour, I can't say I have any major issues. It was fairly conventionally directed, with the occasional shot here and there that feels a bit more aspirational. I think that was probably a sensible approach, it meant the direction didn't get in the way and was largely successful, rather than jumping into something really ambitious and stumbling. The animation is strong, the background work is particularly astounding. The character design is decent, although a couple of characters look a little similar, which does lead to a tiny bit of confusion at a couple of points. But as a production, P.A Works' strengths certainly shine through.

But I show up to a Mari Okada film for the writing, and she's given us some of her best work here. This is a beautiful story, heartwarming and heartbreaking and tragic and gentle. It's a story about love, about growing up, and about motherhood. For someone who doesn't have the best relationship with her mother right now, it kicked me square in the gut. Sometimes a story just hits you somewhere so deep, so personal, and Mari Okada is someone I find does that for me quite often, but even then, never anywhere close to this level.

I can't promise you'll have that experience. The friends I was watching it with reacted at various different levels, and not all of them at anywhere close to the same level as me. But even if you don't, it's a touching, emotional film that's bound to give you something you're looking for. And maybe, just maybe, you'll find something in it like I did. I, for one, will remember this movie for a very long time, and I imagine it will come to hold a very special place in my heart, as the first piece of art to ever make me break into tears.

I'm a big fan of motorsports. In this coming year, I intend to follow, to some degree of commitment or another, at least seven different racing championships. I'm a little bit obsessed. So, hearing that one of my favourite studios, Troyca, and a director as respected as Ei Aoki, were making a series based around the Formula 4 junior category, I was pretty excited. I didn't really care what the show ended up being; I barely even cared if it was good. A proper anime about single-seater racing, sign me up.

I was expecting something a bit shouneny, to be honest. Big personalities, loud, dramatic, in-your-face ... action, a bit of quite abstract direction. Big and exciting and a little over-the-top. Something that attempted to capture a similar feeling to Netflix's Drive To Survive F1 series. What we actually got was not that. Not in the slightest, in fact. We did not get a big, over-the-top series about hotheaded racers and their high-stakes duels.

Instead, 'Overtake!' is a surprisingly gentle, subtle, character-driven story, closer to the tone of a slice-of-life. It mixes in a teen coming-of-age story with a mature adult story about regrets, blending the two seamlessly through its protagonists, F4 racer Haruka and slightly oblivious former photojournalist Kouya. It's a story with a very grounded tone, clearly placing its focus on the relationship between these characters, and especially Haruka and Kouya, and it's often incredibly wholesome. There are rivals, but no antagonists, with the dynamics between the tiny Komaki Motors team and their bigger rivals being professional and full of deep respect; at the end of the day, they're all there because they love to race. It's emotional when it needs to be, giving both Haruka and Kouya some deep-seated traumas to process and work through, but doesn't cross the line of losing the verisimilitude of the story; you can see both of these people existing in real life quite easily.

Of course, this is also a racing show, and as a fan of motorsport, I feel well served. It's clear that the writers on this show went to great lengths to ensure that they were portrayed an authentic vision of Formula 4, and as someone who knows a lot about those fine details, they did a near perfect job. I do feel similar watching these races as I do to watching real racing at that level; this goes for both the world-building details of the sport and the industry surrounding it, which largely rings true, and the animation, which gives the cars exactly the right feel and physicality to make it clear that authenticity was a big focus.

In the end, it all comes together into exactly what it needed to be. An authentic, grounded portrayal of a wonderful area of motorsport, with incredibly easy characters to connect to and root for, and a final conclusion that isn't unpredictable, but managed to bring me to the brink of tears, purely because the goals and drives of the characters were things I came to care so much about. It isn't overly complicated, but because of that it manages to be the best version of what it is; a story about two people doing their best and improving each other's lives for the better. A wonderful experience for a motorsport fan like myself, but also an easy recommendation for anyone who just wants a neat, emotional story that will make you feel.

I can't give this season of TV lower than a 7. It just doesn't deserve it. But, while I can acknowledge all of the show's many strengths, I think this is also going to be the end of my time with 'Jujutsu Kaisen'. I think it's a worthwhile approach to reviewing to explain why.

This show looks amazing; the character designs are fantastic, the animation is nearly unparalleled (thanks, unfortunately, to the work of many animators who deserve far better treatment than they get from their employers), the direction is strong and distinctive. The characters are unique and likeable, with the villains managed to be incredibly ... awful and scary while still feeling like they have genuine personality and even, in some cases, pathos; in fact, I can't really think of a single character I don't feel positively about. The dub is fantastic, with strong performances throughout. The music is great. The pacing is strong. I have, on paper, little bad to say about it.

But this season, namely episodes 42/43, have made me decide that I have no interest in watching the next season when it eventually arrives, for one key reason. Those characters, the ones I pick out as a reason to enjoy the show? I don't think Gege Akutami cares very much about them. At several points during this season - the Shibuya arc is more egregious here but 'Hidden Inventory/Premature Death' does it too - interesting characters, including at least two major supporting characters, are killed off quickly and, in my opinion, without much narrative justification. At two points, female characters are killed off in a way which, despite the fact that I am personally a little more cautious with these sort of terms, can only be called fridging; killed solely for shock value and to create emotional turmoil for the male characters. The other major character who dies is a man, so doesn't come under that, but is certainly killed for shock value with minimal attention being paid to the character himself. The Shibuya arc also shuffles one of the main characters (on a subjective level the character I personally find to be the most interesting part) to the side, and while I'm sure he'll be back eventually, it still puts me off. It's the deaths that have spoiled it though.

Because it's not just that characters I like died; it's that (especially with the upcoming season being titled 'culling game'), I no longer trust the story to make caring about these characters worth my time. I don't trust that it won't kill off any character for shock value, and while I'm sure for some that adds a nice sense of 'Game of Thrones' like tension, for me it does the opposite. If any character can and will die with no warning for a cheap shock, none of those characters mean anything. Characters are where I connect to stories the most. 'Jujutsu Kaisen' was a story I cared about because I enjoyed the characters; the dynamic between the main trio of Yuji, Fushiguro, and Kugisaki felt like a more grounded take on the shounen tropes, felt like really engaging and believable characters. The supporting cast are the same. So if I can't trust the writer to treat those characters and dynamics with any value, why should I care?

I'm sure someone people have an answer to that question. Mine is simple: I shouldn't. I don't.

Conceptually, I love everything about this film. I love the art style and animation. I love the way it trickles the worldbuilding in throughout, teasing enough about this world of robots and other sci-fi technology to make sure the audience understands what's going on, but, while this might sound strange, doesn't explain just enough that the sci-fi aspects just feel like everyday life. By not explaining it, it makes it feel like it doesn't need an explanation.
Most importantly, though, I love the base premise. I love the dynamic between the two protagonists, the titular Hal and female protagonist Kurumi. I love the way it ... slowly teases out the emotions, and builds the dynamic between the pair of them slowly. I love the way things slowly start to fall into place.

And then it burns the premise with ten minutes to go. Oops.

I have a rule. If you're going to throw a massive twist into a story that changes the fundamental premise, if you are going to pull the rug from under me and make the story something quite fundamentally different, you have to make me like that new premise more than the old one. If you leave me disappointed that the original premise isn't the story I was watching, we're going to have a problem.

Ultimately, this is where Hal fails for me. I was really enjoying the story I was being shown before the twist, and, to me, the twist didn't really add anything, and stopped the story from being the story I was enjoying. I can still appreciate it on its own merits, I still think it looks great and loved the worldbuilding. But I was engaged with the story it was telling for the first 50 minutes, and then it decided to be a different one, and I can't not be disappointed by that.

A strong, fun story, with a compelling concept, a fun cast, and a story that plays out at a mostly nice pace and has a solidly satisfying ending. Tonally, it reminds me a little of something Mamoru Hosoda would make, with its rural setting and slightly high-concept premise, but unfortunately this comparison also leads me to what docks it points.

While it's fine for a work to be more story-driven than character-driven, the Hosoda comparisons fall apart when you realise that most of the key characters don't really learn or change all that much throughout it. The ending scene (before the post-credits addition) kind of makes ... it clear that the only real change the main character has gone through is being a little less awkward and learning how to fish. As I said, it's fine to be less character-driven, but I think there was genuine space for a much sharper set of characters arcs here, and the slightly calmer tone, which in the early stages is more slice of life than anything else, would have lent itself nicely to that. The show overall somewhat lacks consistent emotional stakes; there are a couple of scattered scenes with good emotional work, but the points where it should really count, the story takes precedence and those emotions don't really surface. The ending is particularly jarring here, with a farewell that could, and arguably SHOULD, have hit with a lot more emotion than it did.

It doesn't ruin the show, the story that there is is fun and engaging and satisfying. It's a 7/10 show that I enjoyed a lot. But I also feel like it wouldn't have taken much to be an 8/10 show, with a much more EMOTIONALLY satisfying experience, and I can't entirely let it off for that.

The issue with a show with a bit of an out there premise is that it can be very easy for a lack of care and thought to break the audience's suspension of disbelief. 'Yuri Is My Job' is a good example of that; at least, its second half is.

I say second half because this show adapts two fairly distinct arcs from its source material, primarily focusing on two sets of characters.
In both cases, the shows makes a self-aware nod at the modern shoujo-ai canon, with its premise pulling hugely from stories like 'Maria Watches Over Us', taking its prestigious girls academy full of ... constant sapphic tension, and making its over-the-top drama not reality, but a themed cafe. It's a fun idea, that allows the show to play with the ideas these settings make easy, while still allowing for a breezy, comedic tone. And that makes protagonist Hime a good choice; a person whose cute, friendly personality is as artificial as the world the staff of Cafe Liebe bring their customers into. It makes for a strong set of themes around masks and secrets, and is a good source of drama. In the first arc, focused on Hime and her 'schwestern' Mitsuki, the show finds the balance between these aspects very well, telling a story which uses the idiosyncrasies of the setting to its advantage, and building it into strong stakes, characterisation, and a resolution that is perhaps a little rushed, but which feels mostly satisfying.

The second half, however, fails at most of these things. Shifting focus to Hime's best (only) friend Kanako, who is secretly in love with her, the story lost me more or less entirely. Kanako's backstory makes her seem unreasonable and unlikeable. More egregiously, the backstory of her arc's partner, Sumika, crossed over the line the first arc balanced itself on so well, ultimately blurring the lines between the artifice of the cafe and the reality that they are, effectively, actors doing a job so much that, for me at least, the suspension of disbelief required collapsed. In the first arc, the weight given to the schwestern relationship doesn't feel like it exists because it's really that important, but because of the position it forces Hime and Mitsuki into, and how it informs their more real-world relationship. Here, its treated like this plot point to make customers feel like they're in their favourite manga has the same weight it has in a story like 'Maria Watches Over Us', and it left me feeling quite disconnected from the whole thing. The self-aware streak dissolves, and what's left isn't so easy to buy into.

The initial premise is silly, of course, but only to a point. The finer details and the nearly entirely high-school-age workforce stretches reality a bit, but not anywhere near far enough to damage that suspension of disbelief. In the second half, however, it stretches things too far, and ultimately snaps.
It's a shame, because the first half is strong, and is an enjoyable story. But the second half ultimately knocked the wind from the show's sails for me, and left me too disconnected to the setting and premise to stay emotionally invested.

#Note: this review should be taken as referring to all three seasons of this show - but not the film.#

I really wish I could say slightly more about this show. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, because I did. I definitely did. It's a well put together story, incredibly sharply refined storytelling. It's well-paced. The art-style is distinctive and sharp, and the animation itself is very strong. The English dub is one of the strongest I've seen; I feel like the fourth-wall-breaking, wise-cracking take on what in Japanese is a more deadpan style of narration probably would get on some people's nerves, but ... it made the show for me. The characterisation is strong, with the main cast, the student council plus Hayasaka, being distinct and well-rounded, and in the one instance where that's less so - Chika doesn't really get an ounce of development - that is forgivable because she was already perfect and shouldn't change a thing. Many of the side plots blend nicely with the core story, and the episodic nature was something I wasn't sure about at first but which definitely lets it explore its premise very well. By the end of it, it comes together into a strong conclusion, with a well-executed plan that is big and bombastic but which feels logically sound and satisfying to see carried out.

So why is it that I've come out of it thinking 'yeah, that was fun', but thinking nowhere near as highly of it as the show's average rating on here suggests most people do?

The truth is simple: from the start of the first episode, all the way through to the final scene, the part of this story I cared the least about was Miyuki and Kaguya's relationship. I just don't think it's a particularly interesting romance, from an emotional standpoints. Their back and forth, their schemes and plots to make the other confess, that was a lot of fun. But I never really cared if they worked. I like the two individually as characters, they both develop well, they both have a decent amount of depth, I care about both of them separately fine enough. But I never felt like I really got a good justification for their feelings, never really felt the show explained why I should want them to be together. o, I didn't really. It's not that I thought they were better suited to being with other people, in real life I'd get why they'd be into each other. But as a story, as a ROMANCE, I just felt it lacked stakes, lacked any dramatic momentum. I found every other character dynamic more interesting; I know some people ship Miyuki and Chika, and while I don't quite see that, I admit that their dynamic feels more compelling. But that's because they all are. Chika and Kaguya's friendship, Kaguya's dynamic with Hayasaka, Ishigami's dynamics with everyone, especially with Miko in the latter half of the show. I care about all of these more than I care about this relationship.
Match that with a climax which the show keeps undercutting by throwing in other bits, including pointless jokes with characters we have no attachment to, and which the show tags too many pointless epilogue scenes to (I love an epilogue, but these scenes add nothing), and it lands with just a little bit of a thud. Not a massive disaster, still definitely a good, well-written show, but a story that just doesn't do as much for me as it clearly does for so many others.

I've never seen a film that seems so genuinely unsure about what it wants to be. To an extent, I think it mostly wants to be a dystopian science-fiction alternative to the historical fantasy of 'Princess Mononoke', and that's not a bad idea in the slightest. And it puts the pieces in motion well. Introduces enough characters to build a story around, a compelling enough mystery box of a female lead, some good world-building. But at a certain point it sort of loses track of everything, and by the end I found myself a little confused as to what it was trying to do, be, ... or say.

Because I do think the 'Princess Mononoke' comparison is apt, I think it's tonally similar, and aesthetically similar to a degree, and I think that the film thinks it's thematically similar, but it's just... it's not sure what those themes are. If it was inspired by 'Princess Mononoke', then the writer clearly didn't actually understand what that film was about. It's missing all the things that made it good, the moral complexity and the lack of a clear villain, the sharp environmentalist message. Instead it's got an obvious villain, while somehow managing to simultaneously have a really poor grasp of who's even supposed to be right or wrong, and its message is muddled to the point that I don't really know what it was trying to achieve in the first place.

Match that with some pacing issues and a lack of expansion of half of the interesting concepts in the film, and it all comes together into something a little less than the sum of its parts. Not awful, it's got cool ideas, and it looks great, but it's also just a bit of a mess - and learning afterwards about the lost original plot makes that even more damning.

Like I imagine a lot of these lower budget independent projects turn out, I think this would have been better pitched as a proof of concept than it is as a more complete work. As a proof of concept, there'd be a huge amount that should convince someone to put some more budget into it. There are definitely some strong concepts in there, a pair of protagonists I'd like to learn more about, strong vocal performances (always easier to make the standout with a lower-budget piece), and a really, really nice hero mecha design.

Unfortunately, it suffers from its budget and runtime. It crams a ... lot of story into a 30 minute film, which means not only is it incredibly fast paced, but also doesn't really explain anything. You sort of pick some of it up, perhaps more than you'd expect even, but I can't really tell you what the story was past the broadest of shapes. The animation is also fairly poor, not unreasonable for an independent piece, but that doesn't actually make it better - although the mecha battles, not limited by having to give some approximation of human movement, manage to be a lot stronger than those human scenes.

If, like Mecha-Ude releasing next year, this short and its sequels picked up enough traction for a bigger studio to bite, I'd be thrilled. With a proper budget, the story you can get your head around is strong enough that I definitely think a fully produced version would be pretty incredible. But this isn't that version, and if it's to be seen as anything other than a proof of concept, those ideas aren't quite enough to make this stand on its own merits.

A manga I'd recommend to the right person, 'Inside Mari' was an interesting manga to blitz through in an afternoon. The concept is obviously strange, and at points it risks dipping into some trickier places; either through fetishisation, or simply limited understandings of some of the thematic concepts involved. For the most part, perhaps one notable scene aside, it does avoid these issues, and the story is able to breathe enough to make it generally work.

Thematically, it dips its toes into ideas of gender, but it would be difficult, oddly for the premise, to make that the focus; in fact, once it gets the ... early back and forth over the minutiae of the physical situation, establishing the things that the protagonist has to adjust to in a girl's body, I would argue that identity in general is really the key thematic space the story explores. And it does generally explore that space nicely, letting itself blur the lines between the characters' identities in a compelling and interesting way.

Where it perhaps loses a point is in its ending; not any more than a point, it's still pretty good. But it feels like it could have done with a chapter or two more, with a couple of points, both in terms of plot mechanics and character beats, left a little vaguer than I'd like, a couple of conflicts seemingly resolving themselves without us seeing them. And given there's heaps of queer content in this story, leaving that particular storyline as one of the most unresolved felt like a shame.

But, if you want something thematically interesting, which explores some very complicated ideas reasonably well, and don't mind dealing with some content that could have been a little less voyeuristic, it's worth digging out and having a read of.