Anime Reviews
Hello World (2019, Graphinica)
ハロー・ワールド
One day a strange orange aura appears in the sky and indecisive bookworm Naomi Katagaki ends up finding himself chasing a three-legged crow that flies off with one of his books. He meets a mysterious man in a white cloak that only he could see and soon he discovers he is himself 10 years from the future, claiming he was from the real world and the younger him was just a simulation of the past. His purpose now was to rewrite the records with the aid of knowing future events via Project Chronicle Kyoto "Alltale", a quantum computer system that records every tiny event that happens in Kyoto. It was the only way he could watch what could have been of his relationship with Ruri Ichigyou.
No, this movie isn't your first programming lesson in coding but it is sci-fi... or more like magic. Other than the whole simulation of history, the rest of it feels more like magic because the whole plot and direction is just really silly for the most part. A lot of it doesn't make sense.
It feels like Orange where it couldn't decide whether to be sci-fi or fantasy. As Naomi puts it, "sci-fi isn't just fiction, it's an extension of our real world" and that's what makes it interesting. Girl Who Leapt Through Time was given a device that allowed her to time leap within limits and the plot stuck to it. Steins;gate on the other hand goes even further, giving a detailed hypothesis about how the human memory could be saved and then transferred through space time. Here, we are just told about how there's a quantum computer that can simulate a whole city and that's all there is to the science part of the movie. Nothing about what's so special about quantum computing or how the simulation is structured or works so it feels more like magic. The movie might as well just been an Isekai, another world story.
Other than that it's fairly good eye candy if you enjoy detailed backgrounds with pretty lighting similar to Shinkai's movies.
Right from the start it's got some nice upbeat music and beautiful bright vivid backgrounds to look at; which fits well with its romcom genre. 3D character models don't look too bad too and blend in fairly well. Admittedly, it was really the eye candy that caught my attention as I watched this knowing nothing about it. Voice acting on the other hand is kind of flat and it's your familiar high school setting again.
Character designs looked familiar but I couldn't quite put my finger on it... Turns out they're done by Yukiko Horiguchi who worked in the designs for K-ON and Lucky Star.
It tries to be sci-fi but leaves the science out so unfortunately I'd have to give it a miss. If you're really after a sci-fi romcom, I'd suggest watching The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) instead.
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