The plot of the movie is pretty simple and straightforward: Cocoa goes back home for a week to help her mother and sister at their bakery, and of course as a result she and her friends have to have a brief departure from each other. With Kokoa's absence from Rabbit House, we got bits and pieces of character development and backstory glimpses both with Kokoa & her family and Chino & Rize prior to before Cocoa first appears in season one. This movie prioritizes the situation present by having Chino get a chance to properly reflect a bit on her relationships with both Kokoa & Rise separately; with Kokoa's absence, it becomes more apparent that she'd finally had more of an affect than Chino thought, however now that there is a break from Kokoa, this time is used to reflect on how close she'd been with Rize as well, from the moment they first meet to the present moment of this movie.
The characters are the same as their usual selves from the main series for the most part with the exceptional additions of Kokoa's sister Moka & their mother. While Moka made an appearance in the anime for a while, here we not only get a chance to see her more, but all three of the Hoto girls as one and get more of a feel for how connected Kokoa and her family are with each other.
Along with the main roles besides Chino comes Rize.
Now, I always felt that Rize might've secretly had the most interesting character of everyone on the main series from what we learn about her prior to this, and here this movie took a good chance to poke a little more into her combat soldier personality and shows more of her true colors outside of her rough love. And her moments were probably the most notable thing in the movie for me because she gets a chance to stand out more than ever.
The animation and sound are on par with that from the main series, even with a new studio behind the series for it's future adaptations, the aesthetic pleasure of the main series' environment are back in play with the scenery of France looking as beautiful and clean as ever along with the simple skippy and cheery background music accompanying it. The song played the first 10 minutes into it and the ending song give the same feeling as the OPs & EDs from before.
Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka??: Dear My Sister does a good job keeping itself consistent by giving off nearly the same vibe as through the first two season, for the most part this movie felt like I was watching an 3 part OVA of the series more than anything because despite this being a movie I never felt like this was one since the main plot of it is something that felt commonplace with the series instead of being much of a standalone work.
With this movie's completion, I can say that I'm confident with the studio switch and look forward to seeing how production doA do with GochiUsa later on through the OVA & 3rd season in the future.
