Over the Sky

wucchu Dec 12, 2021

4.5

I'll start off by saying this movie was not bad but if you're looking for a good movie I advise you not to watch this. Intro I decided to write a review on this since there weren't any previous ones. I came across this movie by accident and was intrigued by the Discussions where people rated it basically 0/5. I also went through comments on Crunchyroll because it was rated over 4 stars there despite being just above 3 stars on Animeplanet. Some people had also commented the movie was a 10/10 even though most comments said it was a waste of their time. So obviously I became curious and I had to see what they were talking about. Before I started the movie I had dumped all my expectations down the drain so I had nothing to lose but the 90 minutes of my life. Story (4) I have always been a sucker for love confessions so naturally in the beginning I was invested in the story. It felt like it'll be just a regular story of a girl confessing to their childhood friend but oh boy was I wrong. Yes, in a nutshell, that's the plot, but in reality it has been dragged out to whole another level that it all just didn't make sense. Basically, the moment the movie stepped into the "unknown realm" with scifi-like twist I knew this movie wasn't for me. Nevertheless, I continued watching it through the hazy drug-induced dream and I almost fell down my chair when a musical scene suddenly introduced itself. I felt like I was watching a badly written Disney movie when she was not only singing and dancing but also touching objects and making them glow. I realize she was just telling herself about her true feelings so why couldn't she just say them without the whole musical? The story didn't really have anything interesting so it failed to impress me yet I couldn't hate it. Even the small details felt out of place and it made it seem like the movie was trying way too hard to be good thus failed. That's why it being 90 minutes long was unreasonable and it could have been cut to half. If it had been made as a generic romance drama with childhood friends confessing to each other, it could have been better. Animation (7) The animation wasn't bad, it was decent. Character movements were rather fluent but sometimes they felt a bit blocky and forced. Throughout the movie, I felt like the characters lacked a ton of color and it ended up making them look as dull as they were in reality. There was a lot of stuff going on in the background such as flying penguins and whales and lots of colorful sparkly things trying to make up for the dull-colored characters. Some animated scenes ended up looking rather clumsy for example running and bicycling but it didn't bother me that much. Sound (5) The soundtrack was okay, it wasn't anything new or different so it was average. Screaming parts sounded super unnatural but otherwise the voice acting was okay. The musical part was cringy and I wish they had thought about it twice. Also, the ending song was some nice background music while reading the comments. Characters (3) All the characters were dull, really. They're nothing special and don't have any unusual characteristics and have a minimal amount of development. Half the time it just felt like the characters were empty shells running around since they didn't have any personality. The only interesting character was a green bunny-looking plushie that truly reminded me of Puella Magi Madoka Magica's white bunny. (You shouldn't trust bunny-looking creatures!!) Afterwords I don't feel like I wasted time by watching this since it had so much potential but came out flat and boring. Nevertheless, I won't watch this movie again and I wouldn't recommend it either. I felt vibes from Puella Magi Madoka Magica and other movies called Hello World and Children of the Sea. I think all of those were better than this. If someone really liked those  I could maybe recommend this one to them but while waving a red flag.

kaasknak Jan 20, 2022

6

While the story itself is very good the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Below here will contain mild spoilers. This film is very much grounded on the feelings we have for the character and the characters have for each other. This is unfortunately also where the film drops the ball the most. The voice acting is not good and this especially shows during emotional moments where the voice sound annoying and loud instead of emotional. This film could have done with a longer runtime to flesh out the characters a bit better. Madoka is a very dear friend to both Mio and Arata. Unfortunately this is never really shown on screen and as such we feel basically nothing for her. She barely gets any screen time and when she does she leaves little to know impact. Arata seems to have supernatural power, some problems with his family because of these, a very complicated relationship with his mother due to this and misunderstand her intentions and he is in love with Mio. Except for that last point nothing of that is actually shown or even implied. This is a shame because this leaves it up to characters to explain all these things to us but not explain them in a satisfying manner. We get half explanations that would have been so much better if they weren't included / hinted at / implied and the viewer would have been left to fill in the blanks. The story circles around the love between Mio and Arata but we aren't shown any of these feelings. Because of this the viewer has no investment in the relationship or the confession. Mio is supposed to be the star of the show but seems to be a very flat character that is mostly there to cry. Her character could have been explored much better by delving more into her meeting her grandmother again. Or showing before how important her grandmother was to her. At the end of the story we basically know as much about Mio as we did in the first fifteen minutes of the film.

chaosdahlia Dec 13, 2021

4

i was expecting this is going to be a generic romance school, but i was wrong, it turns out into a fantasy adventure with monster and i think it doesn't make sense