KAIJUU NO KODOMO

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA DramaKaijuu no Kodomo

REVIEWS

• 

  hxie

  73/100
  A narratively disjointed film that is a mediocre adaptation of an excellent manga. However, gorgeous animation.

  I went to a screening of the film at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles that featured a Q&A with the director of the film, Ayumu Watanabe, and Kenichiro Akimoto, the CGI lead of the production.

  You can tell the amount of technical effort that went into the production of this film. Daisuke Igarashi's lush art is translated decently into animated form. The CGI and hand-drawn animation are integrated extremely well. The sound design helped me smell the ocean. Kenichiro Akimoto mentioned that a goal he was given was to make it hard to tell between what was hand-drawn and what was CGI, and he completely succeeded on that front. It would definitely be harder to play "find the obviously CGI object" in this film.

  I was expecting a swelling and memorable soundtrack because of the involvement of Joe Hisaishi, so I was disappointed to find the score to be more rote and bland. I actually do not remember a single major theme from the soundtrack. Ayumu Watanabe mentioned that he wanted to work with Joe Hisaishi because of Hisaishi's penchant for minimalism, and I agree that a bombastic and extremely melodic soundtrack would not have paired well with the film, but given the memorable themes that Hisaishi has produced in the past, I felt that some of the imagery of the ocean and the universe in the film was screaming to be complemented by grander, more identifiable musical motifs.

  Ultimately, I felt a little disappointed when comparing this film to the source material. There were some odd adaptation choices. Professor Anglade was given a technobabble info-dump at the end of the film which really ground the film's pacing up until the climax to a halt. We don't need a verbal explanation for an acid trip! Not enough of the manga's content was axed to allow things to fit more comfortable into the run-time, resulting in what I felt were quite a few disjointed scenes and odd cuts.

  Industry and economic circumstances don't really facilitate OVA's these days, but I can't help but feel the manga could have been better adapted over 6 - 8 longer OVA episodes. Especially with the inclusion of the technobabble and half-baked plot threads in this film, there just was not enough time for the characters to coagulate and consolidate into interesting persons. The manga did struggle with too much plot and exposition going on in the last couple of volumes (manga spans a total of five volumes), but there was more time for Ruka, Umi, Sora, Jim, and Ruka's parents to feel more alive.

  My heart is telling me to rate the film lower because I didn't actually enjoy the film all that much to be frank, but the director seemed so earnest at the Q&A that I wanted to give some more points for the effort. It also feels criminal to give the film a score under 70, especially because the animation was that spectacular.

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• 

  TheAnimeBingeWatcher

  75/100
  Don't try to understand it; just feel it.

  The best word I can think of to describe Children of the Sea is “overwhelming.” It’s not so much a movie as it is a whirlwind of sensory experiences, music and sound and color and light clashing and colliding like the tumultuous waves of a stormy sea. It’s a cascading tsumani of pure artistry painted on a stunning canvas that builds and builds and builds until whatever grip of reality you might have once had is shattered and you’re swept away by the sheer explosive wonder of it all. It’s perhaps a more purely “cinematic” experience than any film I’ve watched in a very long time. Certainly, it’s one of the single most gorgeous pieces of animation I’ve ever watched, period. And if you’re at all interested in checking it out- which I think you should- the best piece of advice I can give you is this: don’t bother trying to understand Children of the Sea. Just feel it. Experience it. Let it flow over you and around our and through you and fill every pocket of your mind and soul with its presence. I promise you, you’ll be better off for it.

  The story, so much as it matters, centers around Ruka, a young girl who lives in a town by the sea. She’s listless and drifting through life, buckling under the pressure of bullying at school and her parents’ rapidly disintegrating marriage. But everything changes when she goes to visit her dad at the aquarium he works for and makes a shocking discovery: there’s a boy swimming with the fishes! His name is Umi, and he’s lived his entire life raised by sea creatures. He can walk and talk on land, but at this point his body has adapted more to living in the ocean. Soon enough, Ruka is drawn into his lively wake, and they start spending summer break together, along with another seafaring boy named Sora. But it quickly becomes clear that there are much bigger things afoot. There’s a group of researchers studying the boys for unknown reasons, all the animals in the sea seem to be gathering together, and the boys speak of some unknown ritual that the Earth itself is preparing for. And the more time Ruka spends with them, the deeper she finds herself pulled into the mystical power at the heart of it all.

  On the surface, you might think that plot setup would lead to a youth adventure story as the kids set out to unravel the mysteries of what’s going on, possibly on the run from those evil researchers. But that’s not where Children of the Sea’s focus is. In fact, the longer the film goes on, the more the plot seems to become an afterthought. In the end, we get few answers to what was literally going on, and it’s pretty clear that we’re not meant to fully understand how or why any of this is happening. It’s all operating on a purely sensory level, speaking through imagery and music just as the highly symbolic whales that populate the film speak through oceanic songs to communicate far beyond humanity’s capacity to understand them. As a downside, that does mean there’s not much to be found in the way of real emotional connection here. The characters don’t grow or change much, most of the relationships and subplots- Ruka’s parents reconciling, a researcher named Jim rebelling against his superiors, Ruka’s antagonistic back-and-forth with Sora- are pretty underbaked, and the eventual climax operates on such heightened dream logic that it’s difficult to parse what, if anything, we were even supposed to take from it. Suffice to say, this is not a movie to watch for the plot. This is a movie to watch for all the stunning imagery the plot exists to facilitate.

  But holy fucking shit, what imagery it is. Even from the start of the film, when we’re still grounded in the normal world, the production is gorgeous from top to bottom. Stunning background art, evocative and detailed character animation, a constant sense of sun-bleached, windswept wonder... it’s as beautiful as any Ghibli film, albeit with a slightly more grungy, tactile edge that acknowledges the sweat and dust and grime of the world as it exists. And that’s all before the surreal, increasingly phantasmagoric imagery starts filtering in. The deeper Ruka dives into the world of Umi and Sora, spending more and more time in the ocean, the wilder and wilder the imagery gets. The sea and the creatures within it take on increasingly abstract shapes and forms, colors and lines blur and shift, a heavy rainfall becomes an ocean of droplets racing through the sky, bioluminescent plankton becomes a sea of stars streaking across the sky, giant whales with archaic eyes on their skin leap through the waves, and all rendered in some of the most unspeakably beautiful animation I’ve seen in a long time. Imagine if Mob Psycho 100 had twice the budget and was an art-house mood piece instead of a shonen action series, and you might have an idea of how fucking good this movie looks. And then we reach the climax, at which point everything descends into a near-wordless acid-trip synthetic visual opera, weaving together infinite strands of visual thought in some kind of grand metaphor for the concept of creation and existence itself for twenty straight minutes of pure, unadulterated eyegasm. I had no earthly clue what was going on, but I was nothing short of captivated all the same.

  And that’s Children of the Sea in a nutshell: an explosion of some of the most beautiful imagery you’ll ever see animated. Don’t go into it expecting a well-structured movie in a traditional sense, because you’re bound to be disappointed if you do. Go into it if you’re in the mood for something that will sweep you away on a purely sensory level, probably lasting a little too long in the process but never quite overstaying its welcome (seriously, though, I felt every second of this hour and fifty minutes). It’s far from perfect, but it doesn’t need to be: the magic it provides is more than enough.

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• 

  Szugata

  100/100
  Why I love Blue: The Movie or I Wish Real Life Was This Beautiful / Real life is just as beautiful if you observe

  A love poem and beautiful ode to the depth and perseverance of life and all things being.

  There are as many ways to life as there are living beings.
  This is an anime so well animated, it made me feel the cool breeze when standing under a roof, on a hot summer day, made me feel the warmth of the sand, the chillness of the air, when you stand on the beach at night.

  Perhaps the most well animated movie, the details are spectacular, but most importantly it feels HUMAN, in a beautiful way.
  It mixes the inherent allure of the ocean, where all life is derived from on this planet, in a perfect and consistent way. It is a perfect movie.
  The colors are as vibrant as your youthful teenage memories are, as bright as you would want your life to be.

  

  You have to feel it just as much, if not more than thinking, to understand it.

  The movie begins pretty lowkey, but in the second half it becomes an audiovisual parade, that overwhelms the human senses.

  Whales sing songs under water. The animators captured what could not be in mere words or mediocre Tokyo Ghoul animation.
  Some introspection is perhaps necessary to understand the world, and it's underlying mechanisms.
  They used auditory and visual components to their fullest effect, while restraining from unnecessary excess. My Bloody Valentine's 2nd album, [Loveless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveless_(album) could be compared here.

  The heartfelt music is beautiful, though minimalist and most importantly the opposite of sterile (even if not very memorable). It accompanies the scenes very well.

  I would recommend watching it with headphones or on a big screen. Perhaps both.

  The motion of humans, objects and animals is perfect animated, you get carried away, as if you were there. You feel the sway of the
  whales, that roam under the sea.

  Nature by nature (pun intended) is appealing, alluring to the average human. After all, it is what shaped our evolution.
  The entire universe is just a huge net of being. We are all related to each other, to the tiniest of ants. And that is beautiful. We are the product of nature.

  This movie in my eyes is about the love of nature and the love of other people.
  Electric blue skies, wild green plants, warm reds and browns, tranquil blacks, this movie has everything a motion picture should need. It is a perfect balance of style and substance.

  This is probably the fattest 10 I'll give for a long time.
  This movie has completely enchanted me.

  I recommend listening to this song:

  And playing Rayman Origins, since it is visually pretty similar.

  __Go watch the movie, I can't do it justice.__ (And I don't wanna hype it up too much either).

  I hate seafood.

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