Fireworks

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.

Visually emotive. But nothing magical about the story if we're being honest.

This film tells the story of a school girl who finds a pretty transparent ball by the sea. She plans to run away from home to escape from her unhappy home, but her escape fails until her friend finds out the supernatural power that the transparent ball has.

"Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or The Bottom?" is so different from what I thought. It is in fact not really about fireworks, but a science fiction story that is akin to the previous animation "Your Name". The story is sad, especially when I hear Nazuna's wailing cries, which are very depressing and spine chilling. I sympathise with her situation. Her plan to make money in Tokyo is even more upsetting, which indicates that her home situation must have been very bad.

The story is quite easy to understand, and is interesting. The Seiko Matsuda song that is sung in the tram is really beautiful, I should check it out. The very final scene is a bit puzzling, and is open to interpretation. I heard people discussing about it, which is a good sign because it means people liked it enough to talk about the film.

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.