It's mainly about whisky blending, they don't touch on the whisky distillation process really at all.
Weird balance between too nerdy for some and not nerdy enough for me.
The plot revolves around Komada Rui trying to revive a blend originally created by her late father using the last of their whisky stocks and including some from other distilleries. Takahashi Kotarou is a reporter who doesn't really care about whisky but slowly comes around to it after spending time with Rui.
The plot is fine, but I didn't connect with the characters much, feel like it would have been better as a series instead of a movie. The character development of Kotarou is just to quick for me to really engage with him, while Rui needed some more on her backstory. The plot kind of has the same tropes as Japanese dramas about work (no problem can't be fixed with a UNHEALTHY AMOUNT of overtime work). Also it's quite nerdy about whisky but at the same time I would have liked it to be nerdier. I felt it ran the line of being nerdy enough it may put off people not into whisky (some people were asleep in the screening I watched) but not really nerdy enough to appeal to hardcore whisky fans.
Give me a 12 episode series with an episode on pot still design and selection, one on cask types, one on barley types, one on peat levels, one on yeast, etc. with maybe Kotarou learning about these things with the audience and why this matters. That would be my perfect whisky anime!
As it is it's enjoyable and definitely needs to be enjoyed with a dram. Slainte!!
