Part 1 is a 5 minute silent 3D animation. You know, the type you'd see at the start of a Pixar movie. One that's clearly just meant to be an animation demonstration rather than trying to tell a story or anything. It's... well, it's certainly on par with big-budget 3D films, but there really isn't anything noteworthy about it.
Part 2 - the main bulk of the film - is 50 minutes long, and it's basically like a normal episode. ...No, it really is, up until the end (where things really started getting serious/flashy) it genuinely feels like it was just an extended normal episode, definitely not the kind of thing you'd expect from a movie. It's also... not good? The animation and such were pretty standard, but the story itself felt more like an excuse to have the protagonists doing girly stuff (dancing, cat-walking, cooking) than an attempt to tell an actual story. It wasn't particularly interested in setting up this new setting (so it looks very generic) or telling an emotional story (so the side-characters barely do anything and the main characters feel like they're waiting for something interesting to happen). Oh, and the scenes themselves are pretty boring. The only actually interesting thing about it - other than the ending, which was good enough I guess - is the whole "What has the bad guy got planned", but even that was ordinary and uncreative. Basically, this is a long-winded way of saying that the whole Part 2 felt like a big missed opportunity.
Part 3 is the actually worthwhile part though, and chances are, the only reason you're reading this review to begin with. It's a 20-minute 3D animation with a FANTASTIC style! I mean it genuinely might be the best I've ever seen in a 3D film. ...Okay, so maybe personal tastes might vary on that, but at the very least, it's certainly unique. The stylised 3D shading/outlines allows the show to use much more 'anime-style' shortcuts than regular 3D cartoons (which requires a lot of animation effort to look appealing) and doesn't have the same jarring effect that 3D-but-flat-so-it-looks-2D anime has. As in, it clearly DOESN'T have the same effort put into the animations as big-budget films (and it clearly has points where it could have improved on), or Part 1 of it's own movie, yet it still looks amazing! ...Oh yeah, and as for the thing itself: unlike Part 2, this one doesn't have a story beyond "We need to help this stranger beat up this bad guy" - which is actually nice, because it means more time for sweet action scenes, which is what 3D anime absolutely excels at.
I think you can see why I have trouble rating this. If it was just Part 3 alone, I would have given this a straight 9 out of 10, but Part 1 is nothing special and Part 2 felt like a big waste of time. Ho hum.
