BL is a genre with very, very low standards. I’d say that the only genre that’s worse off in that regard may be shows for kids, and even that is debatable. So, once in a blue moon a BL anime that isn’t utterly terrible is released, and just by the virtue of not being completely garbage it gets praised as the best thing ever. And to be fair, in comparison with most of other similar works, it’s pretty good. In comparison to regular anime though… that’s a different matter.
First, the good part. The visuals are gorgeous. This movie is very nice to look at, and especially the backgrounds are aesthetically pleasing. In this aspect, the production value is high, which is the opposite of average BL product. To give credit when it’s due, I have no complains about this part. Maybe the only downside being that this is the only interesting thing about the whole movie. It almost tempt me to give it a higher score, but unfortunately rest of it is still dragging the enjoyment down.
The story is… chaotic. It feels like watching a digest of a series you have never seen. The characters are poorly introduced, it’s riddled with confusing cuts that seem to just skip over huge portions of would-be story, and has timeskips without warning that make it even more confusing. We are given no reason as to why should we care about the characters at all – unless of course you are a fujoshi, in which case the usual procedure would be to get hyped about boy’s love and disregard everything else, no further characterisation is required. Ultimately the story, or at least what I could catch from it, adds up to about an average shounen-ai plotline about dude liking a dude while some people are not fully okay with that. Nothing groundbreaking. I have not read the original work yet, so I don’t know if it too is as rushed as the movie, but guessing based on the fact that it is only one volume long, the adaptation probably didn’t left out much things.
There is one part where the story finally stays at one place for a longer time and finally starts giving out a bit more coherent storytelling and even a somehow interesting source of conflict which again tempted me to at least give this a 6/10, alas it makes up only about fifth of the runtime and the movie still feels like a very long trailer than an actual movie.
As hinted at the start, this is actually very good for its genre, but that is really saying more about the awful state of the genre than the quality of this movie. It is nice that it’s not so creepy and rapey as “classics" such as Sekaiichi Hatsukoi or Loveless. It’s nice it has animation that doesn’t look like a deviantart user was made to be in charge of the storyboard. But, that doesn’t make it great, that just means it passed the mark of not being terrible. Still, for fans of the genre I would recommend it. For others – well, as I mentioned, at least it looks