Drifting Home

This was another beautiful movie. I would say though that the whole thing with the complex being at sea made no sense. But does it really have to. The more I watched though I interpreted the film in a way of childhood innocence slipping away from these kids as the one thing they have always known may not be with them anymore. It was a very nice film and I enjoyed the character development we got with each of them, there were some intense scenes that were a little scared and at one point I thought it was all the head of the main character. Overall though yet another lovely anime. Its showing that netflix is getting better and better at making them.

This show could have been good if they didnt rely on unruly children being annoying and bickering the whole time to create drama and obstacles.

The art is great, the theme is unique. But the characters are just completely unbearable.

The children all looking back at their life remembering their best memories when they are like 12 years old is super annoying, they make them reminisce like they have lived these long traumatic lives full of woes and hardships. These are kids, not 50 year olds meeting up for a class reunion.

Kid being a jerk to everyone just to be a jerk. Other kid being a jerk just because hes selfish. Other kid being a jerk because the other kids being selfish.

The only likeable characters are the ones that seem more like side characters just there to fill the empty space.

Very complex plot not intended for kids. At the surface the plot might seems a supernatural teenage story. But for old school Japanese anime lovers they would appreciate and understand the story which discusses childhood trauma and its effect (isolation, anger, emotional numbness and failed relationships).

The plot was extraordinary, using the water and storms as metaphor for emotions and feelings and stressing on the importance of close relationships.

I don't understand the low rating of the movie, I think most of people didn't get it. It reminds me so much of studio ghibli movies, entertaining but with an important message.

A movie that provoks emotions and leave you with a feeling of loss and relief at the same time.

This films best quality is its animation. By far this is the best thing about it. The buildings moving in the water and the underwater scenes are great. The story is really original and if the movie was shortened by twenty minutes or so, it would have worked much better. The thing that massively holds this film back are the characters and runtime. The runtime is just under two hours and it drags. The films two leads keep apologizing to each other time and time agian to where its just annoying. The mysterious conclusion on what happened at the end just seemed cheap and that they didn't know how to end it. So while there are quite a lot of positives to keep the film afloat to me, it is certainly far from perfect. That saying I think a 7/10 is deserving seeing as the film worked enough to where it had more good then bad things for it.

The art is very beautiful and the environment is visually enjoyable to watch, I really loved the colors and the graphics. The story itself had a lot of potential, especially when it comes to the mystery character.

However, the story just doesn't go deep enough in my opinion, and has the focus on the wrong thing. Instead of exploring the real mystery about the situation, the whole focus story wise is on the two main characters and how they are "like siblings", except they are just not that interesting. These two don't develop at all, they stay exactly the same and you can predict exactly what they will do. They keep repeating the exact same story about their life by thinking about memories that keep repeating pretty much the same point, as barely anything really happened in their life to begin with. They keep arguing about the same childish things in the most unrealistic times, when there are clearly more important things for them to worry about. Everything about these two characters is just very repetitive through the whole movie, even though everything else about the movie could be way more interesting, and gets completely neglected by the script. Majority of the other characters are just there for the sake of saying there are more characters, and we barely learn anything at all about them.

There are so many great directions this could have gone if the story was actually about the drifting house and if they explored Noppo's backstory more, but sadly it ended up mostly as a drama story about two children who keep talking about how they use to live together, and argue for no reason in every situation that makes zero sense to argue on.

All that said, everything other than the story about these two characters is still nice to watch, it's just hard not to feel like there are so many easy ways that this movie could have been better.