a sweet, mindbending, and all around great animated film

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2018)

From the crystal clear, beautifully crafted animation to the likability of the two protagonists to the tense drama to the light humor, this semi-love-story is lighthearted and very moving to the point of now being one of the most acclaimed films of recent years. And perhaps one of the most acclaimed films of all time. I had a couple of little problems w/it, thus making me avoid any statements about the film's status among cinema's finest efforts as they'd be rather hyperbolic coming from me, as well as simply just not genuine. Instead, however, I will happily praise the film on various levels.
As a technical achievement, it is stunning. The animation is spectacularly done in every scene, the characters are really alive, the scenery is beautiful, in general it is just a really fun movie to look at. There were a few surprisingly surreal and borderline psychedelic moments here and there in the film and they worked not only to further the plot but also to simply show off the massive tons of talent pouring itself into basically every shot of this movie.
Story-wise, it is also stunning. It's a mixture of a few genres. At first, it almost feels like some light slice-of-life type comedy w/a magical-realist twist, but eventually it becomes something much more emotional and dramatic than that. It becomes a film featuring multiple dimensions and complicated situations these two leads who I genuinely grew to adore and care for had to trudge their tense ways through. It is a supernatural drama and a love story on top, and a very unconventional love story at that (the way the romance of the film is handled is unlike almost any other romance I have seen; it is clear these two are in love, but they never express it openly at all). It really felt like the writer really matured over the course of writing this, which is as much a blessing as it is a curse, b/c it does mean that the film improves heavily w/every scene, but it also means that the beginning and early middle of this film are no where near as great as what follows. And, do not get me wrong, there's some super fun stuff in this roughly-first-half of the movie, but there's also a few eye rolling scenes and weird incorporations of pop songs and overtly expository dialogue and non-endearingly cheesy moments that I just could not get into. Thus, my score drops down by a single point. It is still, obviously, a wonderful movie, and sort of a must see for lovers of animation and world cinema in general.