Review of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

Now, since this movie was an ending to the series as a whole, this review will sort of act as both a review of this movie alone, and how well it wraps up the show. EDIT: so it turns out that, according to a commenter, this anime is unfinished. That affects the review quite a bit. I'm not going to change the original review, just write comments This will include mild spoilers for the anime, though not so much this movie. You really shouldn't be watching the movie without having first seen the main anime first, though. Now, I've seen a lot of people say thisanime and movie are amazing, and one of the greatest anime ever. This is one of my favorite anime, but I don't think they're 10/10, and 9/10 is a stretch for me. But of course, some of my favorite anime are Shimoneta and Tokyo Ghoul, both of which get extremely mixed, and many times negative reviews, so what do I know?

Story: 6/10
This movie has an interesting plot, not without it's holes (Nagato is an android. She is an AI, but you would think that her creators would've installed a contingency plan for what she does in the movie, being that they're all powerful aliens. And why is Kyon unaffected by the reality change?), though it does fall into cliche at times. It's not terribly hard to predict what happens - you can figure it out by simply reading the description. The plot would've had a higher score had it wrapped up the series in a satisfying way. Many of the plot elements introduced earlier don't actually resurface and come to a satisfying conclusion. Remember when Koizumi looked at Kyon's neck, and the camera zoomed in on a mole on his neck? Unexplained. A question posed at the beginning of the movie, why Kyon is unaffected by the change in reality? Unexplained. The romance hinted at between Haruhi and Kyon, and even the romance hinted at more heavily between Kyon and Mikuru? They didn't go anywhere with that. The tension hinted at between Mikuru and Koizumi's organizations? They didn't go anywhere with that either. You can't help but feel the whole show was pointless, since there's no meaningful reward at the end, like most other great anime I've seen. EDIT: I guess a lot of these can be explained by it being unfinished, though it seemed like the movie was meant to have some finality to it, at least to me.

Art: 7/10
I didn't feel the art was anything special, but that's fine. I've only ever found the visuals in an anime to unsatisfactory in Angel Beats (the faces are WAY too squished) and Death Note, which came out the same year as this show and somehow looks way worse (I watched it on Hulu, and it might be a service thing, but it looks like it's in 360p).

Sound: 7/10
Again, nothing special. I normally skip theme songs unless I really like them, like in Assassination Classroom or Cowboy Bebop. Here, I didn't really like a theme song, but I think that's just a preference thing, not that its actually bad. I watched the dub, and the English voice acting, I think, is quite good, though Kyon's actor sounds like he's ten years too old for the part, though he pulled off Kyon's sarcasm and cynicism really well.

Character: 8/10
Don't have much to say here, the characters didn't change from the rest of the show, and all of them were pretty good, though not extremely layered. My only qualm was that Haruhi from the alternate universe was pretty accepting of Kyon's explanation of things.

Enjoyment: 7/10 EDIT: This probably jumps to about an 8 with my newfound knowledge
Overall 7/10

So that's my review, I guess.