Well let me just say : I gave it 10/10 but It's not a 10/10 (my rating system is complex and weird..) consider it as a 9.5/10 (:
This movie is not for everyone. You will often hear things like "the movie is boring .. blah blah" , well that's the kicker. The movie indeed moves slowly but the evolution is there. It depends on your type of thing and what you want from a movie.
Many people look at it to the same way they look at shonens for instance, in the description it says "Slice of life" and Slice of life anime are meant to be slow and boring for some (: What I wanna say is that, if you consider yourself a fan of this style, give it a go.
Let's just start with the actual review shall we.
Story: 9/10. It almost made it.. but it didn´t. The story is basically your typical girl that founds her love in life and gives everything for it. Pretty usual. People claim about how "unreal" this is, but I've seen it happening in real life .. many times .. peole giving up on studies and school to raise a family. So that's not the prob. The prob comes afterwords you see, some things felt really weird at some point. There is one special moment right at the beginning where a certain thing (a pretty important one) happens all of a sudden and they it happened was definately not well thought/executed. It's a one time only though as the rest of the movie goes way smoother and much more defined. I can´t go into much detail without spoiling it so bear with it.
The story itself is rather interesting because the fact that Hana, our main character, has to raise 2 children, that happen to be some sort of werewolf makes the story more interesting, at least for me. It makes the normal events .. less normal :)
Art : 10/10. It's not at Ghibli's level (11/10) but it's close. The extreme detail in the backgrounds makes this anime really pleasent to watch. Not only that but the movement and fluidity of the anime are really astonishing. 5 seconds into this movie and I already knew this would have an amazing animation quality, and it did !
Sound : 8/10. Well overall the sound does make it's job, sets up the environment but it's kinda weak. It's there, but you barely notice it. It's a small problem though considering that you will be paying attention to the movie most of the time but there are times when you think to yourself "Damn a good soundtrack would be the nail in the coffin". I did not get too bothered with this, but that's just me ^^
Character: 10/10. For one simple reason : They're interesting. While Hana is our typical super mom, the perfect mother that does everything she can for her children, its still nonetheless a nice character to watch. But the real kicker here are the kids. For the most part of this movie, we won´t be seeing much of them, as they are not the main characters, but we see the change later on, once they grow up. We get to see the struggles they face in their lives as well as a differentiation between the 2 brothers. That causes some interesting conflict and made the second half of this movie much more interesting.
We get to know the characters, what they feel and why they do what they do. I was surprised how the movie pulled this of. In a hour or so they've managed to give a deep develop to both this kids without forgetting Hana.
Enjoyment: Again this will depend a lot, I personally found the anime quite entertaining, and no that's not because I'm a noob, that's because I like this kind of thing. The movie is indeed slow I'm not gonna lie, but it didn´t feel rushed and I always thought that they were spending their time where they should.
Basically the first hour of this movie is the build up for the big finale when everything gets resolved. I must tell you one thing. I've seen countless drama anime already, yet this one was the only one who made me cry .. that's why I'm giving this anime such a high rate, actually the highest on my list at the moment.
I do give a ton of value to the feelings that an anime can give. And in 2 hours this movie made me care enough for Hana, in fact so much that in the end, I was actually happy for her .. god sake I wasn´t crying because it was sad, I was crying because she was happy.. That's something I would never thought it was possible.
In short, should you watch it? Depends .. are you the type of guy that likes slice of life anime? Then please give it a go. If not .. well either you like it or you will hate for how slow it is. Even then I reccomend it.
