Review of A Whisker Away

There are all the ingredients for a good anime here, maybe even a really good one. There is some superb character animation, with strong and clean character design, reminiscent of Masayoshi Tanaka or Kazuaki Morita's work on Tsukigakirei, a series I adore. The first act, too, proceeds strongly. The character relations are set up very well, and we have some strong moments here and there. I enjoyed a lot of the sequences. The second act is also a quality piece of animation, with some really strong viginettes (if a little tainted by the fact that an unintentionally hilarious choice during one of the more dramatic momentsto have Miyo absolutely get wrecked by a pole left me chuckling during what was supposed to be a serious scene.) There's a lovely little scene with an insert song and crosscutting between the perspectives of the main characters.

But...in the third act, an hour into the movie, it was genuinely like another movie had whipped out of nowhere and been grafted onto the end of this movie. Without spoiling too much, it is enough to say that the movie makes a very sharp left turn from magical realism into hard fantasy. The pacing is wrecked. There's no payoff to the story threads or plotlines, and it culminates in a complete tone shift and ends in what is basically a shonen fight, with some secondary characters announcing "sorry we're late" as they arrive to shift the balance of a fight. It's very silly. And then immediately afterwards, we get what's supposed to be a very emotional scene. Except it isn't, because instead of the atmosphere of the first hour, it comes after 40 minutes of high fantasy hijinks.

All the adult secondary characters are shunted to one side in favour of the fantasy setting we collapse to, and character motivations spin on a dime. It's not like Mari Okada can't pay off the sort of story she was setting up in the first and second acts, she's done it before with Anohana. This movie was just a deep, deep disappointment to me. It could have been really good, but except it isn't.

Oh yeah, it also rips off the "nobody else but the people I care about exist" thing from A Silent Voice and god knows how many other unoriginal melodramas.

Sound is decent, although it does fall into the trap of "here is how to feel" music, where it plays sad music when you are meant to be sad and happy music when you are meant to feel catharsis. There is some quality use of CDCG, mostly blended very well, although with some small and forgiveable exceptions.

Overall: the first acts are a solid 8/10. The movie as a whole is a 3.