Review of Hello World

This review contains minor spoilers, wherein I mainly elaborate on aspects of the story covered by the synopsis. Simply put, Hello World is garbage. I could go into an endless stream of comical hyperbole in order to detail this, but I won't waste any time. If you're already familiar with how bad a Mado Nozaki story can be from Babylon or Seikaisuru Kado, don't be. This is much, much worse. Hello World attempts to be a sci-fi romance flick, but unfortunately fails at the latter, and stumbles all over the former. The romance in this film is supposed to be assumed as true, both because our protagonist,Naomi Katagaki, gets roped into having a girlfriend by his future self, and also because it isn't actually developed in any real way aside from a montage of uninteresting events set to a forgettable J-pop song, sandwiched by scenes of cliched romantic tiptoeing. Right after confessing to his future self's girlfriend, Ruri Ichigyou, all romantic development stops and the rest of the film is fully dedicated to the sci-fi aspects of the story, which are just as bad. I'll avoid spoilers, but basically the worldbuilding is conveyed either through long, awkward, and cumbersome scenes of expository dialogue, or through vague, confusing, and contradictory "no actually" moments. This, I assume, is Nozaki's attempts at writing a clever narrative, but instead comes across as two stoner tabletop game DMs having an imagination battle. None of it is truly creative or original, it's just a collision of tropes established by other stories.

The characters are bland, trite, and have characteristics that are in opposition of each other. Naomi is introduced as the quiet, meek bookworm, but these aspects of his personality are quickly thrown away because they would hinder the plot progression, and he becomes able to process and adapt to reality shattering events with the same mental fortitude of an Elder Scrolls protagonist, and it's waved away because he's "familiar with sci-fi books", which should again clue you in on how creative the sci-fi aspects of this movie actually are. Ruri is introduced as the quiet, assertive bookworm. This is the part where I'd talk about her, but she actually doesn't do anything. She's like the flag in a game of Capture the Flag, she's an objective, not really a character. If I were to write out all of the dialogue she's given in the film, it probably wouldn't even fill up two pages. This is the main love interest in a romance movie. Future Naomi is introduced as the reliable chad doing everything for his love, but he spends the entire movie getting cucked, sometimes of his own volition, which is quite unfortunate, but also a little funny, because I don't think Nozaki was intentionally going for that. There's no particular reason to subject him to that, he's written to be a sympathetic character, so I can only assume it turned out that way as a result of incompetence.

I should also address the visuals. They're not good. The models are pre-shaded CG, meaning the shadows cast on them in scenes don't change naturally. A character will look out of a window and his face will be illuminated by the light streaming in from outside. Whether or not he is properly illuminated in this initial position is a different story, but the real disaster comes when he turns his head away from the window and his face remains fully illuminated. Only when his head is a full 180° away from the window do the shadows awkwardly pop in. This isn't something everyone will notice on a first watch, but once you do notice it, it becomes impossible to not notice, and remains distracting throughout the whole film. Aside from the shading issues, the CG models sometimes use the emotive faces found in a lot of 2D anime, and it always looks strange when they do. There's also various visual design choices which look absolutely hideous. For example, Naomi gets a glove that's an ultra-shiny teal. It looks absolutely disgusting because it has no visual cohesion with anything else in the entire movie, which mainly employs warm tones and then later an unsaturated aesthetic, and it's distracting in every scene that it's in. There's also lots of things with thin, rainbow colored stripes which look equally awful.

In summation, this movie is head-to-toe awful (with the exception of sound direction, which was unremarkable), and is a generally terrible experience, far beyond the acceptable range of bad in the phrase, "so bad it's entertaining". Watch at your own peril.