Tetsuko "Alice" Arisugawa has just moved to the rural countryside with her mother. She doesn't feel very welcome when she catches the neighbour staring out the window at her. Not only that, no one wants to be near her at the local school for some reason or the desks left empty in their classroom for that matter. As the days pass, she soon learns there used to be a student who was murdered that sat at her seat. Now everything that happens around her is somehow linked to that very incident. As Alice continues to get caught up with people who know bits about the incident, she starts to investigate.

Here's a movie I was kind of curious about because Makoto Shinkai had praised at one point. I knew nothing about the movie and haven't seen any of Shunji Iwai's other works before so didn't know what to expect.

It starts off quite creepy but turns into some hilarious wild goose chase and the dynamic characters with their snappy reactions and sarcasticly voiced lines just adds to it. It's a funny movie in a strange sort of way as one thing leads to another thanks to its entertaining, lively combination of characters that just makes you laugh. Street smart Alice doesn't let anything get in her way and gets carried way quite easily. Despite all the hilarious moments, it manages to hint at some new info about the murder that kind of makes you feel a chill.

It's a prequel to the live action movie Hana and Alice which was originally made up of 4 smaller short films to celebrate 30 years of Kit Kat in Japan back in 2003 apparently. I guess that's why Shinkai was invited along to its premiere because that's the way 5 Centimetre's is composed too although, it actually started off as a bunch of draft short stories. On a side note, Kit Kat's popular during examination time because someone in marketing must have thought of the ingenius idea that it sounded like "kitto katsu [sure victory]".

Anyway, animation's really rough although I guess it's because it was done using rotoscope style animation where the artists spend time tracing over real world photos as reference to animate characters.

A hilarious wild goose chase full of mystery, romance and friendship. Guess you could say it's a movie with girls doing silly things too in a way.