Summary:
Bubble is a story that fuses parkour-enthused teenagers with a gravity-altered Tokyo setting filled with bubbles. The plot is predictable and unremarkable, and the characters are weak; however, the music and art are phenomenal and highlights. If you enjoy romance and action, this may be of interest to you. It feels much like Makoto Shinkai's lesser quality films. I would not personally recommend this movie for the story or characters, but the art and music were wonderful.
Story: 3/10
Bubble has an interesting setting: a destroyed version of Tokyo but with big bubbles that shift gravity enough to allow for optimized parkour matches. The plot follows Hibiki as he wins parkour team battles independently. The plot takes a few twists that are convoluted but also predictable, forcing some fairy tale relationships and also destruction. Overall, the premise could have been interesting, exploring the cycles of production and destruction, or even the recycling nature of the planets and the universe. However, the plot stuck to a lackluster sequence of events with some forced action and boring characters. Furthermore, the narrative switched to a romance, inappropriately, and the overall plot results in a mix of blurry and blended themes. There isn't much of a moral to the story, and it is certainly forgettable. It isn't a movie that will blow your mind with plot twists or make you emotional, mostly because of the characters and their stakes. This entire story meanders until the end, when there is supposed to be an emotional conclusion that falls almost as flat as a single layer of water molecules stuck together by nothing but their hydrogen bonds.
Art: 10/10
WIT Studios did an excellent job with the art. Not only is the scenery wonderful and bursting with color, but they choreographed many action sequences with intriguing parkour.
Music/Sound: 9/10
Hiroyuki Sawano is a legend and really made the (weak) story and beautiful art come to life. The voice acting was also surprisingly decent for English dub.
Characters: 2/10
The characters in this story lack depth. With the colorful art and fitting music, you'd expect to at least connect with some of the characters. Instead, you have uninteresting characters describing themselves through dialogue. It's hard to take them seriously when their character arcs start and finish with making jokes about being orphans. The introduction to characters is heavily driven by dialogue, and there isn't enough time to show character development. Hibiki is one of the only characters to grow, which is expected for a main character, but he is also a very hollow shell. Even the deuteragonist, Uta, is as bland as possible. She's a simple plot device, which really ruins the premise of the movie. If you're going to make the plot of the story contingent upon a character, you have to at least attempt to explain the character's motive. Instead, we have a character that blindly falls in pseudo-love and (no spoilers) we don't even learn why or how she found the main character. It seems as though the movie tried to mix fairy tales with the plots and characters from Makoto Shinkai's films, but this led to very boring and predictable characters.
Enjoyment: 3/10
I watched this movie for the art and music, which were wonderful. The story and characters were by no means captivating. I wanted to stop about halfway through the film, but I couldn't review this movie on MAL without watching it from beginning to end.
Overall: 5.4/10
