Anime: Sakasama no Patema

I can't honestly understand how this movie is so highly recommended.

On the plus side, we have a fairly new setting, a decent art style and a cute female protagonist (If that's a plus for you, for me it is in any case.) Also the movie does some fancy stuff with the reversed gravity.

But then we are forced to follow along one of the blandest male protagonists ever. A one dimensional villain and his henchman and the typical buddy character who doesn't get the girl because why would he? Buddy knows female protagonist her whole life and bland boy for a couple of days, so of course he falls for bland boy. Duh!

The real problem with this movie is that it thinks it's clever when it is really not.

From a technical standpoint the movie begins decent enough, but then the dreaded still frames start to happen. At first the shots just dwell on too long. (think of the of the infamous NGE scenes.) But in the last third of the movie they literally put still images all over the place, which drags the production value way way down. There is one scene with a lot of debris and the frame rate of the movie drops to outright baffling lows.

At least the music is...kinda there? Nothing special to be honest, but nothing offensive either.

If I had describe the film in one word it would be "Bland" The unique setting is absolutely wasted on the confused script, the lame revelations, the boring characters and the miserable production value, especially near the end of the movie.

If you have never seen an anime in your life, or if you are really young, then this movie maybe fun for you, but there are a lot of better alternatives. Skip this one.

Yoshiura is back after his magnum opus, Time of Eve. How does his new movie stack up? Better than good. Brilliant, actually.

The entire movie hinges on the concept of being upside down. The camera does interesting tricks at certain scenes that will make your head hurt. You start to wonder who is actually right side up and who is actually inverted. The world building is excellent, albeit a bit subtle. Similar to his previous work Pale Cocoon, Yoshiura sprinkles hints throughout the film in the form of cuts, pans, and background notes that really flesh out the characters and their motivations.

Yoshiura kept the simple character art style from Time of Eve, which may look jarring when compared to the intricate and detailed backgrounds. However, the character art is pleasing to the eye and does not distract from the overall enjoyability of the film. The backgrounds are where the movie truly shines. I enjoyed the beautiful skies, claustrophobic mine shafts, and the appropriately designed dystopian society - with even a giant panopticon thrown in for good measure. The camera work is superb, especially during the scenes where Age and Patema cling onto each other and the camera pans from the side to behind them. You really get the sense that they are really flying (or maybe floating is a better word). The situations where gravity comes at play never breaks the rules set inside the setting.

With just over 90 minutes to work with, I expected Yoshiura to return to the peppery fast dialogue that made Time of Eve so much fun to watch. This is some of that, but Yoshiura decided to go for a more subtle approach, utilizing silence and a "show-not-tell" way to great effect. Like in Pale Cocoon, you know just enough about each character and their motivations so that you care deeply for what happens to them. Age and Patema are great together and have great chemistry, but I found myself caring more about the relationship between Lagos and Age's father. However, that's not to say that both relationships don't compliment each other. Yoshiura is awesome at connecting them together, as he did so brilliantly in Time of Eve.

There is one glaring weakness in this movie, which was also present in Time of Eve. Yoshiura cannot write engaging antagonists. In this film, the antagonist's ambitions are a bit trite and cliched, and his motivations aren't made exactly clear. He has the "bad guy who is bad because he is bad" syndrome.

But other than that, I loved the movie. I loved each and every twist and turn. I loved the climax, the great reveal. I loved how Yoshiura (to the most part) stuck to what he does best - world building, dialogues filled with zingers, and toying with our emotions. The voice acting is nice, the music is superb (Ico, anyone?). If you loved Yoshiura's previous works you will not be disappointed.

I think another reviewer complains about how there are plot holes. There are none, I assure you. You just have to think about each scene carefully. Everything makes sense.

I was much impressed by Yoshiura Yasuhiro's other major work, Time of Eve, so to say I was looking forward to this movie would be an understatement. The main idea behind Sakasama no Patema is that there are two societies, each of which perceives the other's world to be upside-down (holy perspective, Batman!). This story seed which drives the whole movie is either completely wonky or amazingly fantastical, depending on how you view it. I find that there's a thin line between the two. Sadly, I regret to inform you that I was disappointed by this feature. It wasn't a complete failure or anything, but I'm a viewer who puts much stock in great characters, and this movie is utterly lacking in that department.

Age is a boy from a regimented and maybe even totalitarian society. His government's leader, Izamura (a very cartoonish and unreasonable and unfleshed-out villain), goes on and on throughout the film about how the inverted people are sinners who were punished for their wrongdoings (what these were, he never quite elaborates on; suffice it to say, he does not consider the inverted people human). Age eventually meets one of the inverted people, a girl named Patema. Put them together, and you have one of the least developed pair of leads I've seen in recent anime films. I really cannot begin to describe how clumsily their back stories are related, and, on the whole, neither gives off a memorable impression. This movie really wastes some good visual character design on these cardboard cutouts.

The biggest failing of the movie is how poorly portrayed their relationship with each other is, and with the major people in their back story -- Lagos for Patema, and his father for Age. You get the sense the director and screenwriter knew that these relationships should be important for the film and for character depth, or else they wouldn't have included them at all, but you never get a true sense of why Patema loves Lagos so dearly (it can't simply be because of some presents) or why Age loves his father, or even why they love each other. I can't help but shake the feeling that Lagos and Age's father should've been the leads instead, and the story would've been better for it. The director and screenwriter seem to have settled for spectacle in this movie in the splendor of its art and backgrounds (which are grand, particularly the underground village where Patema hails from, which we sadly only glimpse bits of) at the cost of substance.

The only parts of the movie I found amusing or enjoyable were the ones that toyed with the perpetual upside-downness of the world, also known as the parts where the camera decided to spin around and make my brain go whoa! By spin I don't mean the conventional 360 degree field of vision. I mean the field of vision remains the same, but the shot revolves around the lens' axis. It's a cool effect, but sadly not enough to make a good movie. Act 1 squanders the runtime it puts toward clumsy character building, Act 2 tries to convince you of the strength of character relationships that aren't strong, and Act 3 has some ill-thought-out action which eventually leads to an ending that does not fully satisfy. The film ultimately falls flat and does not live up to the originality of its concept. Overall 5/10.

This is my first review and I'm not really a big fan of these sections, but I guess I'll give 'em each a snippet:

Art & Animation 7/10
Good visual character design. Bright, colorful. Great background art, particularly the glimpses you get of Patema's village. Animation is okay.

Sound 5/10
Cheesy music cues, bleh.

Story 4/10
Some plot holes. Never even tries to explain why some people invert and others don't, or how the gravity experiment led to this inversion in the first place. More importantly, the character stories fizzle.

Character 3/10
Cardboard cutouts galore. These characters even fail as archetypes. Plus, I think Patema's only written into the movie because they needed a cute girl and a shoehorned romance.... They could've told the story better with Lagos and Age's father as the leads. No development of the side characters. Villain is there just to be a villain.

Value 3/10
I don't think this movie will be remembered in twenty years by anyone, nor will it ever be a classic.

Enjoyment 5/10
*Grumble* Weak character relationships. *Grumble* Plot holes. *Grumble* Poorly characterized. *Gr-* HOLY SHIT DID YOU JUST SPIN THE CAMERA? DO THAT AGAIN! <----- If this movie is remembered for anything at all it'll be for these scenes.