Review of Ride Your Wave

I was disappointed with this movie. I'm seriously sick to death of these SOL anime drama films with a magic/sci-fi element that use gooey, flashy animation to make you feel like you're watching something well written. i feel like they're being mass produced since Your Name came out, which I thought was alright, but nothing worth heralding it as on par with something put out by Ghibli. Masaaki Yuasa is hit or miss for me, but this one felt especially soulless. writing is usually never his strong suit imo. the characters in this film weren't fleshed out beyond each of them getting one or two definingcharacter tropes and that's about it. character development is not shown, instead his idea of character development is someone says "Falling in love is for idiots!" for most of the movie and then in the last 5 minutes says "NOT falling in love is for idiots!". masaaki yuasa needs to stop seeing his characters as devices to move his plot forward to the next flashy animated sequence. the themes are not carefully conveyed so much as they are beaten into your skull and then in case that wasn't enough they just explain it to you. and usually he has interesting animation to back up his films at least, but this film wasn't even all that visually memorable. sometimes the characters' movements are animated in awkward ways, the character designs are as forgettable as it gets, and the palette is just brightly colored with nothing all that stand out about it. you'd think that the animation would look better at the very least considering that this had a film budget.

i've seen 9 of Masaaki Yuasa's works at this point and this is the worst one i've watched by far.