https://myanimelist.net/anime/33218I watched Kimi no Koe wo Todoketai, also known as I Want To Deliver Your Voice. Here are my thoughts:
This is just a ~90-minute movie, so I'll try to be brief.
It should be noted that I'm a huge sucker for anything relating to DJing, or radio, or talk shows, or just anything that involves sharing audio with others really. For this reason I thought I might like this movie, and was cautiously optimistic about it.
The plot of this feels kind of unfocused, and most of the movie consists of the various teenage girl characters messing around in this radio cafe place. There is some petty drama among the teenage girls. Throughout its runtime this movie alters between SoL-like scenes (that often involve radio), and various kinds of drama. This movie felt pretty 'family friendly', in the sense that I could imagine both a child and adult enjoying it. There was nothing inappropriate in here for a child audience (well, maybe aside from one character being in a preexisting long-term coma, and a friendly ladyy slap in one scene during an argument among the girls).
The main premise of this movie is cool and promising. Much of the story revolves around the existence of 'kotodama', which are basically word spirits. The idea is that spoken word has the power to influence reality via these word spirits. I thought this was a great idea for a story, but unfortunately the execution in this case is very mediocre. I also wish they spent more time in general developing this aspect of the story. Although there are some good ideas, the actual scene-by-scene storyline of this anime is pretty uninteresting.
This movie feels amateurish as well as low budget, which is kinda surprising since it came out of Madhouse. I really do not like the character designs – they are ugly and overly simplistic. Furthermore, the character animation is lackluster and the facial expressions lack detail. The setting sometimes looks decent, but definitely not above average for a modern anime movie. Overall the visuals are lacking.
Ironically (recall title), the voice acting in this is pretty bad, overall. The MC in particular has really amateurish-sounding voice work, which is unfortunate, especially considering the importance of voice in this movie. Most of the music they play is well-known classical that you've likely heard before; it was pretty underwhelming. It felt like they played it overly safe by sticking to classical music. Also, teenage girls knowing and liking Vivaldi definitely required some suspension of disbelief. I think it was a poor decision to use classical music for this. There is a song near the end of the movie that the girls sing together; their singing actually sounds surprisingly good, especially in chorus. Nice lyrics too. I would have enjoyed this movie more if they included more scenes like that. The vocals in the ED song were surprisingly good as well.
It's worth mentioning that, despite the short runtime, this movie is well paced and the ending is neat and tidy. They didn't bite off more than they could chew. I also want to mention that there is zero romance (or any sexualization at all) in this, which I was grateful for. All the main characters in this are female, and males are barely relevant beyond facilitating the plot.
My overall rating: 4/10
Although its premise has a lot of potential, and there are some good ideas in the writing, the execution of this movie is unmistakably mediocre.
As far as anime movies go, this wouldn't be a bad choice to watch with a kid or young teenager; I think that's one aspect of this that could be a selling point. There aren't many anime movies I could say that about, so I think it's noteworthy. In particular, I can imagine a young girl (like, about age 8-12) really enjoying this due to all the early-teens female social dynamics it contains, and this movie overall has kind of a girly Disney-like vibe to it. In fact the more I think about it, the more I'm realizing that this anime was made with a young female audience in mind. This movie seems like something a mother and daughter could enjoy together.
I've seen multiple people liken this movie to Kimi no Na wa and Koe no Katachi – this assertion of similarity is utterly moronic and not based in reality. Aside from being a drama with a similar title, this has very little in common with those two other movies. Anybody saying this is "the Madhouse response to [KnNw/KnK]…" has meme brainworms and isn't analyzing things objectively. I don't know the reasoning behind this movie's title choice, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a marketing gimmick designed to catch attention and spark discussion due to its similarity to the aforementioned well-known titles. Maybe there's a story to be told regarding that.
>>3852The character dynamics in Hanasaku Iroha were dark and twisted in many ways.