First time viewer
Spoiler warnings ahead as usual for a simulwatch thread, as it's after the start date when people post their thoughts.
MAL has the genre for this down as
Drama,
Romance,
School. I'd say that succinctly describes it. The film doesn't cover a wide variety of topics, it's very much what you see is what you get, so in that sense it's a fairly straightforward film. Although I'll be buggered if I know why the film features egg as a running theme, it's Mardock Scramble all over again!
We begin the film with Jun Naruse getting scarred for life by being told that the parents getting divorced is her fault, I've rarely wanted to reach into the screen and shake sense into someone, but the father definitely deserved that (and more). The poor girl then of course can't come to terms with things, and believes the father, who we promptly never see or hear from again.
One thing that I can draw certain parallels with is the way that trauma and bad parenting just seem to be acceptable norms in Japan, I mentioned in my
Higehiro review that the parents never seemed to apologise and the mental scarring wasn't left to professionals to try and help with, so here we have
pretty much exactly the same thing. The father of course is a worthless piece of trash, and the mother is more pre-occupied with what the neighbours think than how her daughter Jun is doing.
I would mention here that I am not into musicals. In fact the musical angle was being orchestrated by the music teacher for some unknown reason that was never really explained. At least the film was self-aware enough to point out that it was weird that the teacher was the one who was pushing for the musical so badly whilst trying to appear not to be.
On the whole I think Jun was the most fleshed out character, and seeing her deal with the inability to speak was at times endearing. I liked Jun on the whole, and wanted her to get better. Her male counterpart was Takumi Sakagumi, who I would say was a fairly uninteresting character, he didn't seem to have any real note-worthy characteristics, I mean he was nice enough, but I didn't get the sense that he had any deep connection to Jun. I think it's hard to really portray loads in a two hour film though.
The other two main characters were the burly/misunderstood Daiki Tasaki, and the cheerleader Natsuki Nitou. For Daiki I liked that he had some character development, starting out as a tyrant and eventually changing after he realised that people really don't like tyrants. Natuski was the most out of place out of the 4 main characters to me, she didn't really seem to do much except for being the old childhood friend we are so familiar with. She was meant to have been dating Takumi before, but yet she knew very little about him, not his email address (it wasn't called out but I guess this was set before smart phones were common), not his actual address, or that he liked playing the piano or was into music.
Despite all of these shortcomings the film still shipped these two, throughout the film I felt they didn't really have any connection at all. Their were contrivances in a few places like when they were chatting and Jun overhead them, they didn't see her, but they somehow deduced that was the reason that Jun ran way. Jun and Takumi were probably the most obvious shipping, but I guess the writers thought that was a bit too obvious a conclusion, so decided not to. Daiki confessing to Jun was kind of out of the blue for me, and felt shoe-horned in.
I think the romance angle of this was kind of weak, and they may have been better off just focusing on the drama side of things. On the drama side, Jun being able to talk, then not being able to talk, but then she can sing, but then can't sing, and now she can talk normally were kind of all over the place, and people seemed to act like she could talk even though they knew she couldn't most of the time. Felt like I missed the memos where Jun gained +1 speech!
Despite not liking musicals I did enjoy Juns entrance and on the whole the musical itself seemed to have been well put together/animated.
In closing I would say that I will often rate these kinds of things on various levels based on how much I enjoyed them, as follows:
- Didn't like/couldn't finish (1-5 / 10)
- It was OK but nothing special (6 / 10)
- I'd recommend watching it, was good (7-8 / 10)
- Was really good stop what you're doing and watch it now (9-10 / 10)
For this movie I'd place it firmly as a
6/10 to me, I didn't love it or hate it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it.
The art was pretty good throughout at least so visually it was good, I thought it looked kind of similar to Anohana at times (which I'm watching at the moment) but then I learnt afterwards that it was because it was made by the same people that did Anohana.
Sorry for these.
/10 
It's only because it's KyoAni and looks real nice that everyone raves about it (the equivalent of graphic whores in gaming). The story is good of course, but it's obvious bits are missing and reading the manga you see the whole picture (yes, I'm going be one those people), so the manga is better! Whereas AOTH is a film script and feels pretty tight even for a 2 hour film.
