Fleeny

So I went into this 1 hour film blind, without having read any reviews and just briefly skimming the synopsis. Just as a warning to anyone wanting to watch this before I start: this anime is really hard to review without any spoilers!

I am not usually a huge fan of android romance themes but I thought I would give it a shot. So without further ado - here are my thoughts:

First thing that deserves a mention is that this anime is simply beautiful. The animation is superb and the soundtrack is spot on for the plot. I really can not fault either aspect of the anime. It's seriously gorgeous. 

But that's pretty much where the good stuff ends for me I'm afraid. From this point in the review there are spoilers so stop reading now if you don't want to know how things start to pan out.

So the basic premise is that Kurumi, the main female protag, loses her boyfirend in a tragic plane accident. As a result she becomes a shut in. Unable to carry on living without her boyfriend Hal; everything in her life grinds to a halt. Concerned for her physical and mental well being an old man whose identity we are not told until the end of the movie (RED FLAG), who can not bare to see her suffer any longer, send a robot Q01 to stay with Kurumi. 

Q01 has a total make over to make him look and sound exactly like her dead boyfriend, which is decribed in the anime as some form of rare 'robot therapy', overseen by a jovial Doctor who helps robot Hal come to terms with trying to help Kurumi.

Straight away this pulled me out of the fantasy of the film. I am not sure why some people seemed to accept this concept (maybe I'm jaded) but Kurumi resists robot Hal's arrival for all of ten minutes before she starts to warm to him. This is very concerning - who in their right mind thinks that dressing a robot up as someones dead loved one, forcing the robot into that persons home without their consent and then having the robot pretend to be thier dead lover, would make a person feel better? RED FLAG.

If anything that's some creepy sh*t right there.

I am guessing that who ever wrote the plot for this intended robot Hal to be a way for Kurumi to say and do all the things with Hal that she didn't have a chance to do when he was alive and therefore come to terms with her loss and grief. The fact that robot Hal's personality is nothing like real Hal makes this a little bit incongruous and hard to swallow. Almost as hard to swallow as the fact that Kurumi seems to think this is perfectly normal and starts going on dates with the effigy of her dead lover like nothing's wrong. RED FLAG #2

Weirder still is the fact that robot Hal is mistaken by real Hal's friends for the real Hal. Way to mess with someone's friends without any warning! I mean, personally, if I saw the walking, talking incarnation of my dead Great Aunt Judith wander into my home and start cooking me breakfast - I would freak the f*ck out. That would be more likely to damage my mental health IMO, but his friends don't even react. RED FLAG#3.

(Oh and as a side note, Hal's background is pretty sketchy and he has a lot of debts - so his 'friends' are actually the local people trafficking gang of yakuza.)

STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS.

Right, now that you're commited; everything gets flipped upside down in the last part of the film. As if the intitial concept isn't creepy enough - they then go the whole nine yards by making it even creepier. Let's just say that turns out Hal wasn't quite the robot he thought he was.  The plot twist is great, I mean it's evident that something is going to go down from the flashbacks you get, but this twist was inspired. As soon as you meet Hal's yakuza buddies it's quite clear that for some reason his childhood (and by the sounds of things: only) friend Ryo doesn't even know Hal is dead. RED FLAG #4.

I'm not going to spell it out but honestly who ever put this in the romance genre clearly didn't bother watching to the end of the film, because IMO this is some pyschological horror movie stuff. Basically, the first half of th film is creepy, the second half of the film after the big reveal is creepier still. For a romance anime - this sure did give me the heebie-jeebs. There should be a sub-genre for this anime with the tags creepy & romantic. Here after know as CROMANTIC.