Review: The Place Promised in Our Early Days (雲のむこう、約束の場所)

The element of weather such as rain is really beautiful in this movie. There are a few others like snow that you should see at this blog photo album for this movie here.

Two reviews in two consecutive days, I am really on fire! For this entry, I will do a mini-review of The Place Promised in Our Early Days movie, with lots of 1080p screenshots, some of them featured in this entry.

That mysterious tower with a Predator drone looking on.

Story:-
In a version of Japan where they got to vote for the president in White House, two middle-schoolers dreams of flying an aircraft towards a mysterious tower at Hokkaido. But a girl who uttered the word ‘sugoi’ a lot falls into a coma and their plans shattered just like that (no spine whatsoever). The two middle-schoolers went their separate ways but the comatose girl reunite both of them to save the world from the tower that the girl’s grandpa built.

The synopsis maybe a little out of whack, but the story is actually decent. The main feature of the movie seems to be the awesome sceneries that this movie seems to have a lot than necessary. The story started slowly and only gets better towards the end.

The movie uses plenty of time-shifting to help do character development and also advance the story. And there is not much character development in here anyway, I guess that’s the advantage of being a movie. The movie does not have any weaknesses that I can comment, but I do not think that this movie is a masterpiece storywise either.

A tree in different seasons 1.

Character Design:-
The character design in this movie is of the realistic type, the way Ghibli movies are. I think this movie is also one of those that thinks brown is the new black, but then again Japan here is part of United States so who am I to complain?

A tree in different seasons 2.

Voice acting:-
A positive aspect of this movie, the voice acting here is excellent, but no one really stands out.

A tree in different seasons 3.

Music:-
This is where the movie fails. As a whole, the music (OST or ED theme) is wholly uninteresting. Hehehehe.

Even as one of the states under United States of America, English is failing in Japan…

Animation/Direction:-
Despite having great arts, the animation did not really match them. This movie really suffers in some fast-paced scenes where the animation is not fluid enough. At first I thought Media Player Classic is dropping frames (after all, this is a 1080p h.264 movie), but with CoreAVC and quad-core CPU utilizations that never exceeds 25% I do suspect that the animation fluidity in those scenes is simply not good enough.

The directing meanwhile is pretty decent, with no obvious weaknesses and is able to juggle all those time-shifts to create a coherent storyline.

…but a much better attempt can be seen here.