Recommended
Its 23:22 pm the day before an exam and here I am writing a review about a movie that got criminally scrutinized for things that it doesn’t even care about. This is basically me lashing out on how the reviews doesn't understand this movie and thusly rate it low and doesn’t say anything of substance. Even though reviews shouldn’t talk about other reviewers, I feel like I should get to say something to boost its criminally low rating and popularity by mentioning something valuable about this movie that no one else does. Usually I wouldn’t review anything, but since it has such a low scoreand I felt in the mood to write this review as well, I feel like going to war against these peoples opinions and tell you why you should watch this movie and how it has value since no one here seems to talk about it, even the most popular positive review didn’t. Usually I just write this out in tags in my anime list to vent a little and maybe just have it there for people to see when they consider watching it, but this time is different.
Spoilers in the next paragraphs if you care (and please if you do care, but want a reason to watch it without spoilers, then I’ll say that the reason this movie is good is because of the messaging through the psychology and personalities in the main characters and how their personalities hurts them. Watch this movie with the messaging in mind and how the character interactions and character developement shows this.)
Now you could argue that they didn’t need to have been that sexualized, however in a way I find some value in that considering the topic at hand here. This anime is about the people pleasers in our society and how it fucks us up and hopefully makes other people pleasers realize that they might be doing something they don’t want to. I wouldn’t say Im great at analyzing movies or media, not really, but jesus christ why are no one talking about the psychology going on? That’s like the whole point of the movie. If you don’t understand the significance in how the main characters in this movie develops, then you totally missed the point. When they learn the problems with their personalities, that's them actually realizing that their own personalities are based on lying and how bad that is for them. Now that’s the only thing important in this movie in my opinion and it is such a good message to send out when lots of people are in this situation and they might not even know they’re there and just needs a wakeup call. When you critique how these characters doesn’t have interesting personalities and that they’re passive, then that’s exactly the point. So when they with their lame personalities go about life being objectified, being taken advantage of, then I believe that you shouldn’t necessarily say that the sexualization serve no purpose at all when it shows how their lives seemed material with no meaning from the start. The first interaction between Moritani and Murakami was Moritani looking up her skirt, so we already know by virtue of our knowledge of Murakami as a people pleaser that Murakami is going to give Moritani what she wants to please her. So no I don’t find the sexualization to be irrelevant at all. In this movie I would much rather ague that it serves an important function for the message the anime is trying to portray.
I know how hard it is to deal with the double edged sword which is being a people pleaser, it includes constantly thinking about what not to say and do to upset someone you don’t want to be upset. It makes you wind up a silent and passive type, unless you’re more of a sociopathic person like Murakimi in this anime who can read people pretty well. People pleasing is like lying. When you lie you try to control the outcomes of a given social conversation, in essence, you’re manipulating someone, and people pleasing is lying to others about yourself. When you agree with someone that a movie was great, but you’re actually lying, you might not even notice what you actually think of the movie, much like Murakami who doesn’t know what she wants at all. The only thing people know is that you try to be liked and desperately don’t want people to dislike you, which is unhealthy for any relationship. A lot of people go about life in this manner not even realizing it and not really having a choice when doing this, they just happened to find more comfort when people like them and avoid the discomfort when they don’t.
The main character in the anime Moritani doesn’t participate in the social life of others as much as she can. She does this because she finds herself not comfortable in social conversations and because of this she doesn’t get what she needs to get more comfortable, which is talking to people, yet, despite others striking up conversation with her, she doesn't reciprocate. So when she got the power of pausing time, she abused it to get out of them. The fact that Murakami is immune to this power is a medium for conversation between two people who normally wouldn’t get along much.
Would I say this movie is good? I would say so yes, I find the message to be fantastic and how they delivered it through the personalities and interactions of the characters really good. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily supposed to entertain you though, or at least I wouldn’t recommend it on that basis. The only thing I did throw skepticism for when it came to what I think the movie was supposed to do was some doubts about the characters touch with realism, but then after a while I realized that Murakami was sociopathic or alexithymic which means she is unaware of what her internal emotional state is. That made perfect sense to me, because her own slate for memorizing what people like that she wrote down was completely empty other than the fact that she wanted to please others. When Moritani confronts her, she goes nuclear by exposing their secrets to tear down the façade, her mask to hide her real self. Now she can’t be liked by everyone and so she loses her incentive to lie when confronted with her fear of having to be a person with feelings that she needs to care of.
After writing this review, I realize that this movie is actually better than I thought. I was originally not sure what to give it, but it’s a 9 for this one. This movie is going to be somewhat of an inconsistency in my rating system because it doesn’t really have a story or tries too hard to make you attached to the characters or even necessarily make it an enjoyable movie, but damn the messaging and character interaction and development is just in focus in this movie to the extent that the theme necessarily has to not make it an exciting storyline or plot and almost necessarily doesn’t have us get attached to the characters. It’s simply that unique in my opinion and people who say this movie is bad is just wrong. Please show me how I’m wrong.
