Overrated

Rating: 5/10 (14 August 2017)

(NO SPOILERS IN THESE THREE PARAGRAPHS) The sweet love story(?) about a boy and a girl who wished to be someone else, and the wish did come true... but he has to save her first. Or something like that. The only problem is, they don't actually know each other, except by actually BEING each other in what they consider to be only episodic dreams-- I found this concept quite interesting.
The art and animation were amazing, a lot was said about this already, and the guy (Makoto Shinkai) is a master in this, so I'll skip most of it; but I specially digged the final landscape scenes with pastel- colored skies and the trippy transportation scene. Amazing.
Now for the plot.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, and maybe this movie was purposely made without much care for the actual plot in order to emphasize the amazing animation and crazy sci-fi elements, but I'm gonna give my honest impression:
(-----SPOILERS AHEAD-----) I was very disappointed once I watched it and realized that all the hype for "best animated movie of all times" was actually very untrue plotwise. It's just a collection of clichés and typical anime-like shoujo (un)romance. Wait, there were also several big plot drivers, all of them unnecessarily mashed together and none of them fully explained: -Body-swap. -Memory loss. -Time travel. -Meteor destroying a whole city. I felt like it was too much to handle for a young love story, and all of that load created a bunch of plot holes and nonsense I couldn't just ignore, e.g.: -How did the characters not notice it was a different year? I don't know about other people, but I hardly ever spend a day without something reminding me what year I'm in. -"Oh, that huuuuuge incident of a freaking meteorite destroying a whole town and killing everyone in it? Yeah, we all in adjacent cities (or the rest of the country, for that matter) just completely forgot everything about it". -It's not like they could have just exchanged e-mail addresses sooner or anything, just to check if it really happened, right? Seriously, the whole thing would have been solved way sooner. -The father incident? How nice was it solved! He discovered the true value of her daughter and started to care more for her... I think... did he? - And for that respect... Not gonna lie, even if I were a super caring father, I wouldn't believe what this brat is blabbering, mainly because NOBODY ELSE ever noticed. Not even astronomists or w/e are the people in charge of noticing that kind of thing.
Then, the characters were pretty normal, anime protagonists. Nothing too annoying or too special about them; that was good, I guess. Typical support characters. I would have liked a bit more love development before he went on to save her, it would have made me care more for his heroic adventure.
All in all it wasn't an annoying film. It was a pretty film, it just wasn't a great one. Maybe for younger, more easily awed audiences, this could be the ultimate work of art, but I have seen this plot elements done individually tons of times and dozens of times better executed.