An incredible wealth of potential wasted on hand-holding the audience into a waste of time. There's a constant motif of this narrative being symbiotic to Little Red Riding Hood, and while this is a cool thing at first, it's played to death over and over as the narrative continues. Virtually nothing new comes forth from this motif, and because it's crowding the run-time with over expository allusions, there's no room for characterization, world development, or memorable sequences. What crawls out from this hot mess is something that's more brawns than brains.
There's no real goal any of the characters are trying to achieve. It's not that I needed any aspirations clearly stated for me, but since this narrative forsakes visual allusion for blatant dialogue expository hand-holding, it was strange for the writer to conveniently forget to explain what it is the cast of characters each individually want. I'm not asking for a wealth of subplots, but by doing so, the writer could have created a world I could connect with.
For instance, the first 10 or so minutes of this film are fantastic. There's clear evidence as to what everyone is doing and why. Then, upon Fuze killing the girl, the film starts to go downhill. It becomes impossible to really understand what anyone wants, why, and how they're going to go about doing it. From then on out, it's a matter of guess-timating and accepting what takes place merely because the film says so, not because the characters or anything around them would naturally do so.
And, upon the film's final moments, nothing really comes to fruition. There's no message, theme, or value to be retrieved from the narrative. Because it fails to properly create anything other than visual pleasure, the project fails to do anything than that.
Art:
The animation here is incredibly solid. Many times it felt like watching a live-action. Not because the images were so realistic, but the motions themselves looked great. Characters do more than sit still. They look around, brush their hair to the side, turn their head to the side, tap their foot. It all feels very real and based on an immersive intention.
The backgrounds feel lively, but as the film progresses, things are re-used and less interesting. It's as though the film halfway decides to put anything new aside and return to the old stuff we'd seen before. It's not a super big deal, but considering how gorgeously dystopian everything looked I will admit that I was disappointed to not see anything new halfway in.
Characters look marginally different and realistic. Some anime like to hyperbolize features, but this film is definitely grounded in realism with its designs.
Sound:
An excellent, wonderful soundtrack. I only had issues with one song, and that's because it didn't sound as good as the others, but was still pretty great.
Sound effects were all very good and felt fitting. Unfortunately, they used a stock bullet effect that sounds unbelievably unrealistic. It's used in so much stuff and I still have no idea why. It sounds terrible.
Audio levels for the dialogue are all pretty great. Things sounded solid and I thought the VA work was quite exellent.
Character:
I don't care about anyone. Nobody has any character at all, and nobody has anything to care about anyway. The only reason this isn't a 1/10 is because the use of motifs for the 2 lead characters is still cool despite it being executed horribly.
Enjoyment:
I couldn't wait for it to end during the last 10 minutes. The whole project was downhill after the end of the complicating incident's scene. If I ever watch this again, it's just that beginning part. After that, I'll turn it off.
I will, however, definitely be listening to that soundtrack again. It's excellent, and I'll be damned if anyone ever thinks it's no good. It sounded absolutely beautiful, somber, and sobering. If anything, the music has the potential to recover such a boring work. However, this was still plagued with far too many errors in regards to its execution. Such a shame.
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