Luzes no Céu: Fireworks

Visually emotive. But nothing magical about the story if we're being honest.

I walked in to this movie about 10 minutes late, and I thought maybe I missed something important, but I looked it up online and I didn't really miss anything. The films by this company are normally all very good, and this one looked promising, but looks aren't everything. The storyline seems simple enough, but once they throw in the magic/sci-fi aspects, it becomes very confusing to follow. The characters flip flop between being sympathetic, and seeming to have ulterior motives. I wasn't sure if Yusuke was a nice guy or a jerk, if Norimichi actually cared about Nazuna, or if Nazuna was a sweet girl or hidden psychopath. Once the plot point is shown, there is one ending that the characters could choose that would make everyone happy and fix everything, but it never came to mind. The ending is very confusing and threw too much at the audience. I really wanted to like this movie, but in the end it didn't affect me as much as Your Name or Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Fireworks falls short in most aspects. The characters and their relationships are very underdeveloped, the unique plot hook is not fleshed out, and the animation, while very lovely, is riddled with stilted 3d and consistency errors. I also had problems with the direction at times. Things like the way that some scenes are lit and the audio tracks being an unnatural volume took me out of the film. The latter could be chalked up to the dub or the theater I saw the movie in so I won't count it against it. Overall it seemed generic and did not live up to the importance the movie put on itself.

First off, the animation is absolutely beautiful and if it weren't for a few seconds of really terrible CGI I'd say that the animation would be perfect. The music was also nice.

With that being said the film was so boring, and melodramatic, and dull, and just a complete waste of time. Which is sad being the story seemed kind of interesting. The exacution of the story however was poor. Skip this film and watch Your Name or The Girl Who Lept Through Time instead.

I must admit I've watched amazingly executed animated films but this one unfortunately doesn't make the list. The story: It had a lot of potential but even though the story was okay, it had a lot of twists and turns that could've been taken just a tad slower, but overall it wasn't terrible.

The p.o.v's: In case you haven't watched it to me it felt like the perspectives were jumping from one character to another plus I think the movie experience would've been a little bit better if they added Nazuma's perspective, since it felt like her point of view in this was basically missing.

Character development: Personally these characters felt pretty undeveloped if I could get at least some more insight on why the mc really liked the girl so much, and maybe a little more information on the little ball instead of it remaining a mystery

"Leave it to the imagination": Throughout the beginning when trying to figure out how the ball ended up there, to the end trying to figure out why the two weren't in class. I've seen other movies do this before but for a movie that had such great potential had a bad time trying to do this in my personal experience.

Overall: 6/10