Before we get to work here, I want to slip in this disclaimer. If you’ve read any of my previous articles about this movie, you’d be well within your rights to think that I’m not the most objective person to review this. On the runup to this film’s release, I advocated for its conceptual merits extensively and have showed signs that I’m really hoping for this movie to be good. We call this confirmation bias, and that can be a dangerous thing in critique, as it can cause critics to judge something more or less harshly because we kinda get a kick out of being right about things.

“Wow, SnYves, you really took your time getting around to talking about this one, didn’t you? This story’s so old now it’s being looked at by archaeology undergrads; why are you even bothering at this point?” Reader, I’m writing about this because the trailer has cemented my thoughts that us rationally minded, optimistic patrons of anime, who are not ready to crap on an adaptation because it’s not the thing we like, are a dwindling minority.

It’s gotten to the point for me where if you see the words “directed by Mamoru Hosoda” in one of my reviews, you should immediately interpret that as a confession of bias on my end. I’m not sure what the deal is with him and the rest of Studio Chizu, but I’m yet to find myself not blown away by any of their productions, and frankly I’m not sure if that trend is ever going to change.

Before you read any further, consider this your one and only warning that the following review is going to contain spoilers. Quite a few of them. However, aware as I am that flag can turn people off from this review, I’m willing to compromise. The problem is I can’t give this film the thorough dissection it deserves without having to give away the Act 2 plot twist, because that’s the point where the entire tone, theme and story in general switches gears and almost turns into an entirely different film altogehter, so what I’m going to do is chop this review into two sections.

In 2006, the anime community was blessed with an adaptation of the classic manga series Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, a psychological thriller series in which high-school student Light Yagami finds a notebook left behind by a shinigami named Ryuk. As Light finds out very early on, the notebook has the power to kill anybody provided the user knows the person’s face and name. Upon discovering this, Light embarks on a crusade to eliminate all evil from the world by donning the alias Kira and killing everyone he deems unworthy.

Alright, first review. Let’s get cracking. Straight to the heart of it. Nothing for me to digress about at all. Actually, no, let’s talk about Digimon for a minute. Full disclosure: I honestly don’t know a ton about it. My shounen of choice growing up was DBZ, and if I wanted to see kids use their pets to play Mortal Kombat, I’d throw on Pokémon. But every now and again I’d catch an episode of the original Digimon series and just see if I could keep up with what was happening.