Nerawareta gakuen

If the Japanese had let loose a bit, if they unleashed themselves and made it into a darker adult spectacle that wouldn't unnecessarily strive for simple jokes and naive romance, it could have been fantastic, even though the premise isn't original. As it stands, it's just an average anime that's too pleasing. (19.08.2016)

I am going to start with what anyone could notice almost immediately, and that is the animation and the soundtrack. My first impression of this when I saw the incredibly colorful, bombastic, and beautiful Psychic School Wars was that it is simply breathtaking. Plus, the soundtrack was great too. The problem is that when it is so bombastic and flashy throughout the entire movie, it starts to hurt your eyes after about thirty minutes. After an hour, you begin to find it rather over-the-top, peculiar, and irritating. Sure, some of the shots are truly magical, and I sighed sadly as I looked at the night sky, remembering how monotonous and uninteresting the one I see outside is. On the other hand, if it were the same as in this movie out there, I probably would not be able to fall asleep for all the greenish light. So the animation is nice and colorful and magical; however, they just overdid it, so the magic is lost after a few minutes. The feel-good music was really catchy and memorable, they chose that well, and some familiar themes suited the scenes quite beautifully. As for the characters, they were not very sophisticated, and some were just completely clichéd, like the energetic childhood friend in love with the main male protagonist. However, this movie was not a completely creepy and unwatchable clichéd movie like some soap operas. Oh, and I could write a whole chapter on the narrative. In the beginning, I felt like the movie dragged horribly; I kind of kept waiting to see what would happen and how the science-fiction theme would develop, and whether they would eventually stop with the boring, mundane stuff and the love story. At some point, when I felt like I had spent an awful lot of time on it, I had to go out for a smoke and was surprised to find that I had only seen thirty-two minutes. Then it gradually started to unravel, and I have to say that for most of the middle part, I found what the screenwriters had done to be believable regarding both the love story and the science-fiction elements. My impression of this movie suddenly improved, and I even thought about declaring this movie above average until the moment of the final confrontation. Instead, all I got was "Shall we go to the beach tomorrow?" That sentence caught me off guard and killed all my expectations. Then the ending itself is another thing I will probably be bothered by for a long time, wondering what that was all about. All in all, this movie had a few strong moments and a few things that unpleasantly surprised me. So actually, it is a very inconsistently average movie. 5/10. (21.04.2016)