Da Yu Hai Tang presents itself with astounding visuals that few modern japanese Anime can compete with. Under the surface, however, the Movie suffers from bad writing/execution and doesn't have much to offer besides its fantastic animation, especially the highly detailed world, i.e. the nature or mystic creatures. My criticism is directed towards two main flaws of this movie: The story and the characters.
The story is haphazard. The scenes don't transition well and the story essentially runs from one tragedy into another. It gives Chun no room to develop herself or to expand on any of the characters at all, instead it tries to encompass more and more different elements into it, most of which aren't even connected to main plotline itself. The main plotline would be Chun caring for the dolphin named Kun but the story develops in a very dark way and it's not even really explained why. Things happen because of unknown reasons and it's really hard to follow the "story", especially because of the lack of dialogue in many scenes (which the animation doesn't make up for). I'm not even sure what the core message of the story is. I understood that it's about life, death and reincarnation but the characters died like 5 million times (not literally) throughout the story and were always revived and I don't see what I'm supposed to learn from that. Apparently, every action of every character is inconsequential as well, as everything turns out good in the end.
The characters in this movie are extremely bad. Chun has full focus for 100 min, yet she has almost no personality other than being incredibly selfish. Her decisions seem arbitrary and I think that is also one of the reasons why the story seems so haphazard. Her own stupidity gets her into trouble again and again and after a while it becomes painful to watch. Of course, she receives no character development as well. All she does throughout the story is reviving a guy who saved her in the human world and then she spends the rest of the movie caring for him (reincarnated as a dolphin) and causing drama and more drama. The other main character, Qiu, is just as bad. He helps Chun throughout the story, even going so far as to sacrifice himself for her, but his motives are vague. It's hinted that he is in love with Chun, but I'm not a fan of blind love. All other characters are basically only plot devices with no real connection to anything. I want to highlight the "sort of antagonist" here. Yeah you're reading right: They even introduced some kind of antagonist but made her vanish without ever doing anything notable.
Nothing in this movie makes sense. Chun (for reasons not explained) endangers her village and people even die, yet she decides to stay selfish and care for Kun. But apparently the people around her don't care too much about that as her grandfather even sacrifices himself for her. Why would he do that?
This movie tries to be a coming of age story, but it's lacking the basic concept of coming of age. Chun faces no real obstacles (besides her selfishness and own stupidity) and essentially learns nothing. This is not how coming of age works. Her sole motive and catalyst for the entire story is Chun feeling sorry because some random boy from the human world (who she knows nothing about) died because he tried to help her. And that wouldn't be even a bad catalyst for the story (even though it's kind of generic). But Chun never reflects on herself if she did the right thing or how her actions could potentially affect her surroundings. She doesn't develop from there and for the viewer there's nothing to learn as well. The movie is crammed with emotional scenes and climaxes, but frankly the high amount results in exactly the opposite: You end up not feeling anything.
I think it's sad that the movie didn't expand more on its world. The world is definitely charming and stirring, especially due to the fantastic animation and highly detailled art, but the magic or the mystic creatures are never explored any further. Apparently the people are able to control the elements similar to Avatar but aside from the basic usage of elemental control there is not much more to experience. I don't weigh this aspect too much as this is a "what if?" situation and the movie was clearly designed to be a character-focused drama, but I think if this movie would have just been an action adventure, it would have been way better.
If not for the beautiful art, I would have rated this movie even lower. I was compelled by the art during the first few minutes but I quickly began to lose interest as this movie has nothing to offer beyond its art.
