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NEWS: Sunrise's Nerawareta Gakuen Anime's 3-Minute Promo Posted

Yeah, as one of those people who saw the film in Edinburgh, I'd suggest you don't get your hopes up. In fact, I'd recommend you don't bother wasting your time watching this awful film, but I doubt this'll stop most people.

How bad is it

Honestly, it's not that bad a movie. It's certainly a pretty interesting one, at least.

The short of it is that it's a movie created for an audience which has had access to over half a dozen different versions of this story before - it's less an adaptation of the original story than it is a sequel using the same framework as the original.

Whilst this sounds like it'd put it in the same category as The Girl Whol Leapt Through Time, the difference is that NeraGaku doesn't expect the audience to be going into it fresh. It expects you to know things about the events of the original story, who certain characters are ahead of time, and what certain character motivations are, and it makes no consideration for those who don't know these things ahead of time. The thing is that a lot of the information that is actually referencing the prior work, partly due to the genres in which the movie plays, comes across as some kind of mystery or part of this movies specific storyline to those who don't know any better.

It's mostly fine - the first 2/3rds of the movie are actually pretty great. The problem is that the last third, where the movies SF elements start to take over from the more romantic comedy elements of the work, becomes incredibly muddled and confusing. A lot of the problem is that those of us who saw the movie in Scotland, who aren't Japanese and haven't been raised with this story, had no idea what we were supposed to mentally discard as known information, and what was actually relevant to the conclusion. This results in the belief that there are a lot of plotholes or red herrings in the events of the movie which aren't actually there, and obscures what actually appears to be a very simply story beneath layers of confusion.

To add to the confusion, It also deliberately subverts many of the events of the original story - characters hook up with different characters to who they did in the novel, and situations are sometimes resolved with what seem like bizarre non-sequitors - in an attempt to keep things interesting for a Japanese audience familiar with the original.

This is kind of the problem with most of us who saw the movie in Scotland judging it. On the one hand, most of the complaints are perfectly valid as far a Western audience goes - it will be a beautiful, but massively incoherent at it's conclusion, mess. Even though I think some of the commentary has been a little hyperbolic and harsh, most of the negative reviews are entirely valid in what they are complaining about.

On the other hand, being that it's technically a sequel, I'd kind of like to say it'd be like trying to judge the last Lord of the Rings film without any prior contact with the franchise, but it's not like they are actually advertising NeraGaku as a sequel, and it's not like I'm Japanese or hugely familiar with the original, so I may be cutting it too much slack.

Saying that, I do think the main storyline of the movie came across muddled and unclear regardless, particularly the climax (though I thought the ending - both the part before the credits, and the bit afterwards which half the audience missed - was fine). Unfortunately, everything I know about the original work I've learnt after seeing the movie, though. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie again in order to try and properly parse what is going on with the benefit of the additional information I now possess.

(It's also pretty freaking funny, if, admittedly, in a somewhat forced Key-esque kind of fashion).

Yeah, as one of those people who saw the film in Edinburgh, I'd suggest you don't get your hopes up. In fact, I'd recommend you don't bother wasting your time watching this awful film, but I doubt this'll stop most people.