The story focuses on a young high school girl, Aoi Aioi, who dreams of becoming a musician just like one of her older sister's friends, a red-haired guy named Shinnosuke Kanamuro. Unfortunately, her parents died in an accident, and her older sister Akane had to put her dreams on hold to take care of her, rejecting Shinnosuke's offer to go with him to Tokyo. Shinnosuke left, and years later, Aoi finds herself lost. She feels like Akane is wasting her life being stuck in a backwater town taking care of her, and would be better off if she left and did her own thing. One day, when Aoi is practicing her bass skills, she finds Shinnosuke at the shack where she practices, not having aged a day. Aoi can only assume he's a ghost and that Shinnosuke died. But making things complicated is that her town is holding a festival where a famous enka musician, Dankichi Nitobe, is set to perform...and Shinnosuke suddenly returns, confirmed to be alive, only now a washed up, brooding, deadbeat musician who's nothing like how he was back when Aoi was a kid. Whatever made a younger version of Shinno appear, Aoi and the son of one of Shinno's other former bandmates need to find out what's going on and what they can do to help both the past and present Shinno.
If you're an adult who has ever wondered, "What would my younger self think if they saw me now?" then this is the film for you. It's fairly similar to AnoHana in its premise, but unlike the former, where a character actually died and came back as a ghost, the characters here encounter what appears to be the spirit of their friend Shinnosuke back when he was young, only Shinno isn't dead. The movie explores themes of adulthood and balancing idealism from simpler times with grounded, real-life commitments that come from growing up, with Spirit Shinnosuke representing the former, representing the time in his life where he and his bandmates could dream of going to Tokyo without thinking of the complications that it entails. From a thematical standpoint, I think Her Blue Sky handles its core themes pretty well for the most part. It helps that while Okada's works typically tend feature teenagers as the protagonists, she goes out of her comfort zone here by having the film focus quite a bit on various adult characters, such as Aoi's older sister Akane. They don't wear their emotions on their sleeves as much as kids do, but some of them are still in touch with their younger selves in this way. One of Akane's old bandmates, a man named Michinko, was the plucky drummer of their group, and even after he marries, has a kid, gets a divorce, and gets a job in City Hall, he continues to be cheerful and friendly, helping his friends out when needed, even if he can be kind of a goof.
Unlike AnoHana and one of Okada's other movies, Anthem of the Heart, the company that did the animation for those, A-1 Pictures, did not work on Her Blue Sky. Instead, CloverWorks got that job, and I admit I'm rather mixed on it. On one hand, the character animation is absolutely sublime. Characters move and act out their emotions with their bodies, with the movement being as smooth as butter, with no still frames, no recycled scenes, and very detailed background art. On the other hand, said background art is also kind of static. One reason people love the animation for Makoto Shinkai's movies is that he puts care and effort into every scene, making everything come alive. The character animation achieves this, but the backgrounds don't, and often times, the moving characters doesn't seem to blend with the background because of this. Being a movie about music, Her Blue Sky also boasts a good soundtrack. The songs are well sung and composed, and some are used as important plot points in the movie, but never get shilled over and over again, so hearing them doesn't get old, making their emotional impact hit more successfully (Sorry, Ride Your Wave. I love you, but overusing one song for an entire movie was not the best idea). I also find it interesting that Aoi is a bassist rather than a regular guitarist. Most music-themed anime tend to favor singers or guitar players, so it's refreshing to see an anime put a rather underappreciated instrument in the limelight, letting it take center stage for once.
Speaking of center stage, the characters! I admit...I'm kind of mixed on this one. Some are really bad, some are really good, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Being a movie, Her Blue Sky obviously can't devote all its time to fleshing out its entire ensemble, and that's one of the things that holds it back. The main cast are reasonably well developed. Aoi is a brooding teenager who knows what she wants, feels like she's weighing her sister down, and does want her to be happy under her closed off facade. Young Shinno is optimistic, kind, caring, if a bit of a goofball, while his older self is morose, quick to anger, and weighed down by how his life turned out. Another major character is Tsugu, Michinko's young son who hangs out with Aoi and gets roped into the spirit Shinno business with her. He also gets a healthy amount of development, even though a lot of what goes on has nothing to do with him, as he does want to help Aoi and Shinno out in spite of his snarky, deadpan facade. The best of them is Akane, Aoi's sister. After losing their parents, Akane stepped up to take care of Aoi just before graduating high school, which is the reason why she didn't go to Tokyo with Shinnosuke years ago. She continues to put Aoi first even after Shinnosuke returns to her life. Well-meaning townspeople push onto Akane the idea that she couldn't possibly be happy stuck in a backwater town taking care of her sister, something Aoi herself believes, which does put a lot of pressure on her, but Akane brushes it all away with cheerful stoicism and is perfectly content with how her life turned out in the grand scheme of things. There's a good amount of emphasis put on familial relationships here, and while there are romances here, they thankfully don't take over the movie. In that aspect, Akane is unique, refreshing, and wonderfully three-dimensional.
That said, other characters don't fare as well, because they either don't add anything to the story, take away from the more interesting characters, or just don't get the fleshing out they deserve. The worst of these is one of Aoi's classmates, Chika Otaki. She's little more than an annoying, shallow, superficial girl who inserts herself into Aoi's business just to try and get with Shinnosuke (Not in a sexual way, of course!), caused arbitrary drama between him and Aoi, jumps to conclusions about everything, and was just overall pointless to the whole narrative. You could cut her out entirely and nothing would be lost, and I have to question why she's in this movie at all, as she literally contributes nothing to it and doesn't get called out for her actions. Speaking of not getting called out for their actions, present day Shinnosuke is a real dick towards Aoi when she and Michinko get recruited to practice with him and Nitobe. At one point he's needlessly rude to Aoi, a high school student, belittling her and her bass skills for n. I mean, if you want to critique a musician's skills, sure, but there are nicer, more polite ways to do it, and he never even apologized to her after that.
Now for the movie's biggest problem: Its overall structure really doesn't work in a movie format. It crams in too many subplots, resulting in several of them being introduced out of the blue and then being forgotten in the very next scene. For example, one character tells Shinno that he has a crush on Aoi, but there was nothing in the movie that indicated as such beforehand, so the reveal just seems shallow and shoved in, and nobody talks about it afterward, with the narrative treating it as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment. The stuff involving Chika also added nothing to the narrative. I have to wonder if Her Blue Sky would be better off as a TV series than a movie, similarly to Maquia. Who knows?
Overall, while it's not the best movie I've ever seen, Her Blue Sky is unique among movies that already covered the same familiar ground, and a nice little youth coming-of-age story for those who like that sort of thing.
