I should mention before I give my point of view that I had never read the books or comic series before watching this film. I'm just an average anime fan who has watched a fair amount of anime.
After I saw an ad in the paper of it being shown at the independent theater for a showing, I decided to give this a try. I've seen some great anime films in past, and some bad ones. This slides towards the awful side of anime. While I'm sure rotten fruit will be thrown at me for saying that, I just couldn't like the film no matter how much I tried.
While the animation is stellar, the story line and character development never really develops maturely. You constantly see the ending and the struggle of the protagonist & antagonist constantly. The first 40 minutes is seeing dream sequences, then the ending. You don't see it once, you see it over and over again. The ending is at the beginning. They rushed through the magna's, just random people showing up and saying "Hi, we have special powers to save/destroy the world. Nice to meet you." Time was wasted on long drawn out scenes and the battles would be too abrupt.
Now I'm sure the true anime fan will look further into the movie and give better insight. I didn't nor couldn't get that analytical about the movie. While anime tries to do this many times, I just want a good flick, not a lesson in life.
What really irks me the most is that while watching the movie you expect a spectacular ending that'll just floor you and instead it just slaps you in the face while the credits appear saying SUCKER. While admittedly it has fantastic animation, that's all that it really has. Maybe the subtitled version is better (most of the time this is true for anime) but until then the decision is not recommend this film.
After I saw an ad in the paper of it being shown at the independent theater for a showing, I decided to give this a try. I've seen some great anime films in past, and some bad ones. This slides towards the awful side of anime. While I'm sure rotten fruit will be thrown at me for saying that, I just couldn't like the film no matter how much I tried.
While the animation is stellar, the story line and character development never really develops maturely. You constantly see the ending and the struggle of the protagonist & antagonist constantly. The first 40 minutes is seeing dream sequences, then the ending. You don't see it once, you see it over and over again. The ending is at the beginning. They rushed through the magna's, just random people showing up and saying "Hi, we have special powers to save/destroy the world. Nice to meet you." Time was wasted on long drawn out scenes and the battles would be too abrupt.
Now I'm sure the true anime fan will look further into the movie and give better insight. I didn't nor couldn't get that analytical about the movie. While anime tries to do this many times, I just want a good flick, not a lesson in life.
What really irks me the most is that while watching the movie you expect a spectacular ending that'll just floor you and instead it just slaps you in the face while the credits appear saying SUCKER. While admittedly it has fantastic animation, that's all that it really has. Maybe the subtitled version is better (most of the time this is true for anime) but until then the decision is not recommend this film.