Patema Invertida

The animation is stellar, no surprises there. Voice acting is great as well. Where this film suffers is pacing; it tends to get a little jarring from time to time, and the ending feels... incomplete. It just ends when it feels like it needed just that one last concluding scene where the plot is wrapped up and you just don't get that. But that aside, I had a good time watching this film, even though a lot of the emotion felt a little hollow. The cinematography was definitely what made this movie a film worth watching if nothing else.

Don't read any spoilers for this movie, just watch it if you like anime. I think this is better than most other anime movies out there, including many Ghibli movies.

It does start off a little slow, and the music is pretty mediocre, but if you keep watching you will be surprised how good this movie is. Make sure you pay attention to the small details, and it will all make sense. Watching it a second or third time, you notice things you didn't the first time you saw it! That's all I can really say. Give it a try, you may love it. The story is just fantastically done.

I used to be a fan of anime, a huge one too... but the more good live-action movies one sees, the less one is impressed with anime writing, plots and characters. I'm set for life on screaming 15-year-olds, thank you.

Then again, once in a while a concept anime comes along that just completely blows your wig off, and Patema Inverted is one of these. The main characters are a pair of 15-year- old... dang it. All right, it's not completely original, and sometimes even bad, like when it has an obnoxiously evil general right out of Gundam Wing for a villain. Fortunately, the central couple are very modest with tears and histrionics, which is all the more impressive considering the terrifying anti-gravity hijinks they go through (a "69" version of Castle in the Sky, to put it in very general terms).

The movie opens with the sight of a large city over radio transmissions. The voices begin to talk more quickly, then transition into an outright panic, and then, we see the buildings detach from the ground and fall up into the sky, in ruins.

Patema is an adolescent girl born after this tragedy. She lives in an tunnel community deep underground, and likes to explore the "forbidden zone" - an uninhabited area where for some reason, all the EXIT signs are on the floor and railings attach to the ceiling. One day, she finds a colossal vertical shaft and notices that in this shaft, dust motes travel up.

She decides to follow the motes and explore, and discovers a world outside, covered in grass and trees, where the sky is visible and the stars shine at night. It's too bad that gravity here is the opposite of hers, and she's basically clinging to the world's ceiling for dear life, with the sky waiting to swallow her as soon as her grip gives out. Then, things get wild.

Direction and visual design are superb, and exceedingly creative with the possibilities of inverted gravity, especially when two people - one inverted, one straight - clasp onto one another. In fact, maybe a little too good - there were points where I kept imagining streams of vertigo puke spew out of my face and fly into the clouds. If you're scared of heights, you will sweat more watching this than any horror movie.

Did you ever watch Memento and then spend a couple of hours thinking backwards or expecting to forget everything any second? This type of lasting head-job is something I got very strongly watching Patema. Hell, I'm typing this in Notepad right now and automatically wondering how many lines I can write before they come unstuck from the top of the window and crash down.

Without further spoilers, I give Patema Inverted the highest possible grade. I only just have one additional complaint: have any of these people ever heard of a rope harness?

It's an amazing movie because it's story line is incredible...

In the midst of rehashed Hollywood story lines that we have seen a million times nowadays, it's nice to see something as original as "Patema Inverted" as far as the premise and scenarios go. It is a very interesting and mind-bending take on different groups of people who are affected by gravity in a different way. It also features nice chemistry between the two leads, breath-taking and detailed animation, one of the nicest end credits songs I have ever heard and a great twist ending that I did not see coming, along with the other twist that happens earlier in the film. If you are looking for something totally new and fresh, definitely check out "Patema Inverted."