Luces en el cielo

I walked in to this movie about 10 minutes late, and I thought maybe I missed something important, but I looked it up online and I didn't really miss anything. The films by this company are normally all very good, and this one looked promising, but looks aren't everything. The storyline seems simple enough, but once they throw in the magic/sci-fi aspects, it becomes very confusing to follow. The characters flip flop between being sympathetic, and seeming to have ulterior motives. I wasn't sure if Yusuke was a nice guy or a jerk, if Norimichi actually cared about Nazuna, or if Nazuna was a sweet girl or hidden psychopath. Once the plot point is shown, there is one ending that the characters could choose that would make everyone happy and fix everything, but it never came to mind. The ending is very confusing and threw too much at the audience. I really wanted to like this movie, but in the end it didn't affect me as much as Your Name or Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

First off, the animation is absolutely beautiful and if it weren't for a few seconds of really terrible CGI I'd say that the animation would be perfect. The music was also nice.

With that being said the film was so boring, and melodramatic, and dull, and just a complete waste of time. Which is sad being the story seemed kind of interesting. The exacution of the story however was poor. Skip this film and watch Your Name or The Girl Who Lept Through Time instead.

I'm not gonna say this is a great movie. It kind of suffers from the same standard sins of plenty of anime out there, some jokes don't always hit, parts seem taken from a basic "how to make a successful anime" guide, over-stylised action, and the writing sometimes suffers from first-draft syndrome with a visible lack of polish. However, I'd also be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it.

The animation and music are both incredibly gorgeous. Not exactly on the level of Studio Ghibli, but it's not really trying to be, it feels like it's more often trying to be it's own way. I also found myself interested in the plot throughout despite the aforementioned shortcomings, and some of the characters ended up growing on me. I also enjoyed the tone, which managed to stay consistently emotional throughout.

So, is it a perfect movie? No, especially when compared to the aforementioned Studio Ghibli. But is it an enjoyable one? I think so. Not for everyone, but not terrible. I certainly found myself enjoying it much more than Sword Art Online.

I believe this movie deserves a better score. I didn't quite understand it myself when I watched it for the first time, but I slowly digested it. The core of this story is "if" and "pity". We miss so many chances in our lives, we feel sorry, we regret, and we cry. This movie gives us a chance to catch all the "if"s and correct the unconscious mistakes. However we'll never be able to correct all the mistakes and we even make more new mistakes during this process. We feel empty and lonely. This is life, the mistakes and pity make life what it is. There's always beautiful scenery on the way besides the fireworks. When we become peaceful with life, we grow up.

Fireworks falls short in most aspects. The characters and their relationships are very underdeveloped, the unique plot hook is not fleshed out, and the animation, while very lovely, is riddled with stilted 3d and consistency errors. I also had problems with the direction at times. Things like the way that some scenes are lit and the audio tracks being an unnatural volume took me out of the film. The latter could be chalked up to the dub or the theater I saw the movie in so I won't count it against it. Overall it seemed generic and did not live up to the importance the movie put on itself.