Where to start? To begin with, let's look at the good parts; the animation and art was obviously SO much better than the series. The setting and characters weren't so generic and they all looked well made. Everything in this movie was so much more in depth than in the series. The art, the score (soundtrack), the animation, the fight scenes, the setting, the stakes were all so much better. Because the movie was basically an alternate storyline (parallel but not connected to the original) lots of details were changed. Now, I happened to like a lot of the changes. They showed how much more thought was put into this movie than the series. Like how the yo-yo got an upgrade and the way it operates made so much more sense. However, not all changes were for the better.
For instance, it's a ...musical for some reason..? I guess this was the creators' way of trying to make the movie more likable and trendy, but at least in the English version, the voice actors for the singing parts weren't all the same as the speaking parts and especially in Marinette it was VERY noticeable. It was like she was a completely different person! And why was the singing necessary anyway?
Music aside, the plot could have used some work. I mean, I'm a fan of the series, so my bar is already pretty low, but in a movie you expect more. Because this wasn't canon there were lots of little details that got swept under the rug and lots of stuff that just didn't make sense. Like after Marinette meets Tiki they have a whole musical conversation about how Marinette doesn't want to be Ladybug and at the end of it, all of a sudden there's a threat and the Yo-yo pulls her around the city to find it - that makes sense - but what doesn't make sense is when she gets to the location and meets Cat Noir she completely switches from "I'm not cut out for this" to "No, I'm not your sidekick, I'm Ladybug, the hero"
I just...I don't know man. The movie was enjoyable to me purely for the sake of the art and the little details that were explained in a way that made so much more sense to me. They didn't go very in depth with the lore of the miraculous, but they did do a little bit more background on Gabriel and why he does these things, but the ending was so lackluster and didn't make so much sense. So...is it necessary to watch? No. Should you watch it? Probably not. But if you're obsessed with the characters and are the kind of person to look up fanart just to look at all the cute art styles, you might enjoy this movie just to see a different (slightly better) version of them.
