Her Blue Sky

Did Makoto Shinkai with his movie Your Name open the door for other studios who are now getting away with producing supernatural romance dramas? It looks this way... Anyway, out of the four anime movies I have stuffed into my imaginary gunny sack in 2019 of supernatural romance dramas, this one is definitely among the better ones even though it is not quite perfect. As a viewer, I thought it presented some pretty interesting ideas and subject matter pretty well. The character motivations and behavior are also quite believable. The storyline and the struggles depicted made sense to me most of the time, except perhaps for one moment near the end. I thought that it even worked on an emotional level too. However,! After saying that, I did not really like the main female character who I sometimes found irritating and the movie was also unnecessarily long-winded... Despite all this, I still found it appealing and I would also like to mention the animation which was, in my opinion, very good. After I had finished watching it, I was left wracking my brain wondering how a confrontation between me and my much younger version would turn out... In the end, I resolved this issue after reading a review of the movie that contained the quote: "Never regret your past, and never give up on your future'', which was enough to snap me out of that mental funk. 7/10. (10.06.2020)

This is an anime about a teenage musician who reunites with her much older sister’s ex-boyfriend after thirteen years. However, the burned-out and prematurely aged man appears to her the way she remembers him from her childhood, as a ghost, the way he looked thirteen years ago. The dramatic story with magical, musical and romantic elements excels through great drawing and motifs of how people change over time. The main themes of the film are adolescent anger, the dilemma of love, family ties and the clash of ambition with reality that robs a person of old dreams and ideas. However, the narrative should have been built more tightly and not diluted by side characters and unnecessary side trips (for example, on the topic of urban funding). Several emotionally impressive scenes from the film thus resonate much more than its simple finale, in which even the musical level of the story resounds into emptiness. (21.10.2019)