Bubble

For such a unique and strange premise, it manages to squeeze in a surprising amount of blasé tropes. And for such a visually striking, gorgeous, movie, it's baffling how clumsily it chooses to tell-not-show, with literally quoting its main reference (the OG Magical Girlfriend story, by a certain Danish author), and trite exposition. It also forgets it's a film a few times and thinks it's a music video or TV series. Not a terrible film, but I could imagine a much better one.

Score solely for animation which is precise and very fluid making watching a pleasure. I could add points for the highly appropriate name: like a 'Bubble', very pretty but very little substance. Lacklustre romance anime done in true (bad male fantasy) anime style. Nonsensical plot with teen heroes. Avoid unless very very easy to please (or fixated on fab animation). I love Japanese film for its strange ideas but this one is a strange but silly vacuous money grab aimed at the very immature IMO.

Felt mostly like a vessel to string together a bunch of admittedly impressive parkour animation sequences in a paper-thin plot where I guess parkour is this world's primary mode of conflict resolution, for some reason. It's like how the world of Yu-gi-oh resolves all conflict via characters playing a trading card game against each other. But in this movie it's parkour...

97

not so good

Extremely vibrant and beautiful setting but it never reached its full potential.

I was going to give it an 80 because the ending sequence bombards the viewer with excitement, thanks in no small part to the excellent music. But I knocked it down to a 75 because it is a tad flawed. The premise is really cool, but doesn't reach its true potential. Most of the characters don't really mean much, minus the two main ones. I suppose it's ultimately their story though, so it makes sense. Gorgeous animation. Vibrant world.

The execution is far from flawless, there are a lot of annoying tropes, the story doesn't make sense a lot of the time and the characters are generally quite generic and cliché. But... the main idea and theme is beautiful and quite unique and daring. Visually it's beautiful. Audiowise it's pleasing. So I am glad to have experienced it, despite all its shortcomings. Could have done without the epilogue. Could have been a lot more if it were not for the clichés. But as I said, still worthwhile.

The animation is gorgeous and the freerunning sequences, particularly the match against Undertaker to rescue the researcher, are stunningly dynamic - pushing the medium to incredible heights. But the concept is just too groundlessly weird - even before the little mermaid conceit - to allow for any deeper engagement. For example, I was left to wonder: If the bubbles are sentient extraterrestrials, why is only one of them conscious? Superb art, though.