A Place Further Than the Universe - Reviews

Cute girls being cute, doing cute things. This sums up A Place Further Than the Universe. There's nothing wrong with that, and I'm not one bit sorry I watched this anime, but I don't understand all the love it has gotten.

Some very minor spoilers will follow.

There are so many plot holes, my enjoyment of the show was impacted. For instance, right off the bat we see that one of the girls has saved a million yen to help pay for the cost of the trip. However, inexplicably, she hasn't spent any of it by the end - not even to pay for a plane ticket.

The girls are ostensibly in high school, approximately 16 years old, but 80% of the time their personality is more along the lines of 13. I guess they needed to be in high school to make the trip, but maybe they would be cuter and doing cuter things if they were younger?

One of the girls makes the plan to go to Antarctica, and the day is getting closer and closer and closer, but she hasn't told her parents. Huh? Why even put that in the show??

When they're already on the ship sailing from Australia, they learn that everyone jogs around the ship of deck to stay in shape because stamina is important  -- it could actually save your life in the harsh conditions on that continent. Of course, there's no way to get into shape in the relatively short time it was going to take to arrive at their destination. So, if stamina could be a matter of life or death, wouldn't it have made sense to tell the girls to start training well before the trip was scheduled?

There was so much of this nonsense. I know that the "feel good" nature of the show doesn't stand or fall on how illogical it is, but these issues eventually become too annoying to ignore.

Anyway, you won't kick yourself for watching this show. In fact, if you're willing to let logic occasionally slip away while you watch it, you'll like it quite a bit.

I usually don't watch anime of this type, but it was so nice to watch. Its mainly about four girls on there way to Antarctica and their life there to. Man its so imotional. I was not having such a good week so I wanted to watch something that made me at ease and it was perfect. You should so watch this if you feel like calming down and besides its not very long.

This was so amaizing to watch.

Cute girls doing cute things: Antarctica expedition.

Shirase is a young girl who wants to go to Antarctica, for her mother disappeared there and Shirase wants to see what her mother saw.

Along the way Shirase meets people who become life-long friends and have their own reasons for wanting to go to Antarctica.

Story is much more about the journey and relationship between the girls, rather than just the destination.

Great animation, the lighting of Antarctica is suberb.

Sound hits you hard, it hits you good.

Characters are so freaking adorable and real, more please  orz

This was a good anime. I was expecting more with the awards it won and so forth, but I really wasn't blown away or anything. It was good none the less. Animation was fantastic, and the characters were all pretty decent too. The pacing was good on the first half, but the second half of the season it felt a bit slower. There were definetly some characters that should have had a bit more emotion, but I understand this was a fun, feel-good story and that's what I was left with... Unfortunately, the story lacked any memorable moments. Sure, the part near the end when a critical piece of the story was "found" (I'll leave it at that to not reveal any spoilers), but other than that, I'll probably forget about a majority of the plot in a month. 

A Place Further that the Universe ... happens to be Antarctica.  Not to be taken in any respect with sci fi genre.  It is rather cute girls doing stuff again.  While Antarctica is relatively around the corner compared to something cosmically close as Proxima Centauri, the premise is the impossibility of a journey that is taken by four girls to a civilian operated research facility in the general neighborhood of the South Pole.  This and the rewards of the dare taken.

The unique feature of A Place Further (grammar nerd moment:  shouldn't it be 'Farther'?) than the Universe is the main characters four girls, strangers to each other, who meld into a team of explorer wannabes.  Four girls of diverse personalities who learn friendships are made in the field, and it is sometimes the common-day friends who hold us back.  Chief of the four is Hinata, a schoolgirl who feels trapped in the routine of the academic life.  She wants out.  She wants different.  She wants adventure.  This will come from Shirase, a girl from her school (another class) who has saved a million yen to make her way to Antarctica.  Years before, Shirase's mother went off to Antarctica and disappeared, and Shirase wants to know what was that strange draw to that forsaken land.  Efforts to find some way to get transportation to the deep south is aided by Mari, a girl brimming with chutzpah to try the daring and outright crazy to get on the icebreaker heading for a civilian run expedition called Syowa Station.  This brings the three girls to number four, Yuzuki, whose blogging skills would be useful for the expedition ... except her friends deserted the cause.  Hinata, Shirase, and Mari enlist as the new friends to help Yuzuki give reports of the four-girl team headed for the frozen wasteland.

The adventure has its set of drawbacks as rough seas, seasickness, harsh weather, and erratic sub-zero temperatures.  Shirase learns of her mother's explorer spirit and her love of the frigid beauty of Antarctica.  The routine of running a base camp has its odd chores.  But the glory of the land is the aurora, something the girls nearly miss.

The project could perform perfectly with the flat animation technique; that, and an awful lot of white.  But the CGI scenes of transports on the move and the intricate waverings of the aurora were astonishing.  The plot moves slowly as escapades to find a place on the expedition team and the trip to Antarctica took over half the episodes.  But once the girls arrive, the tedium of actual work in the station and the journey inland into the blast of an intense blizzard are the highlights for the four explorer girls.

But the journey has charms to make the four girls with little else to build bonds to make for strong friendships which would all this over again.  Moments of the hum-drum meets the edge of adventure.  And in the end, adventure wins.  Ask Hinata's school-bound friend who tried to convince Hinata of the security of the daily grind.  Just let the adventure bug bite!

That's the theme of A Place Further that the Universe: one will have to work hard for that quest, but once you get it, enjoy!