Review of Ride Your Wave

Let me start by saying I learned how to write a review on MAL just to write this review. This movie really had some promise, the premise is alright and what it more or less wanted to do could be a good story, but it fails on so many crucial parts. To be fair I'll start with what I liked. First I actually quite liked the music, and by that I mean musically they were not bad songs. I also did enjoy the two main characters singing together as it added some nice wholesomeness to the montage. Secondly I did like theart, backgrounds and still objects were very beautiful and things were vibrant when it needed to be and muted where they weren't. I also enjoyed the couple of action/fire sequences as they were fairly well done and quite engaging. And finally the core story is good, dealing with a person having to handle the loss of a loved one and the toll it can take on them.

Those were the few pros that bumped it up to a 3, but here are the things that it really does poorly. First minor problem is the animation and character design, Im all for unique art styles and character design but these designs often make the characters look down right stupid and often took away from deep moments in the movie as they made silly and exaggerated looking faces, also their animations were often distracting and really took away from the tone being set at times.

Second is the characters, these might be minor spoilers but I will try to remain vague. Our two main characters are pretty underwhelming but not inherently bad. Hinako can be a little stupid at times but overall she was probably the best, Minato was simply bland and so overly romantic at times I almost felt like Hinako was being set up or lured into a trap, see the sudden heart card and lock in the tower. Wasabi was a very nothing character as well, providing very little to the plot except for some very forced feeling conflict with him trying to date his dead friends GF. Finally Youko was by far the worst character, she was a rotten human being and the only explanation for this was she had a sharp tongue as she spews insults and practically mock a girl whose BF just died. Her "redemption arc" also consisted of nothing more than "she has a crush now so she cant be bad." Id also like to bring up the fact that Youko and Wasabi did practically nothing to help Hinako who was, as far as they knew, having a mental breakdown.

Next is pacing. Im a fairly decent reader of subtitles and yet the characters talked so fast throughout the entire film, I found my self constantly pausing and rewinding to read what was said. And yet despite this it seemed like very little was actually being said, towards the end I could gloss over about 60% of the dialog and still understand what was happening. It seemed like the film was constantly racing to get to its two big climaxes, the ending and the other one.

Sound design was also a big problem, while the music used was quite good musically, the way the sound designers used it a lot of the time ruined it. I often found myself getting interested in some very dramatic and sad scenes only to quickly get snapped out of it by the borderline happy music being played. They also did a couple cuts from loud music to sudden silenced, this worked once to create tension but the others times just made me thing my audio cut out.

Finally the story, as I said before the premise isn't bad, however the lightning fast pacing and pointless and/or unlikeable characters caused me to not care about the issues occurring through almost the whole film. The set up to Minato and Hinako's relationship was done in about 5 minutes of montage and then the audience is supposed to feel a connection. For me this connection was never made and any investment I might have had in these characters was quickly swept away by their unlikeable personalities and terrible character design.

Overall I was incredibly disappointed, the art and synopsis looked very interesting and what clips I had seen before hand tuned out to be by far the best the movie had to offer. Its obvious that the background artists and the musicians were not included in some meetings as they are the only reason this film gets a 3 over a 1.