Patema Inverted is an interesting film to say the least. It had its ups and its downs, twists and turns, though overall it was a good film. Mind-bending at times but that's what made it so great. I don’t do scoring for categories like stories, characters, and stuff but instead I just say what I enjoyed and what I didn’t.

Spoilers throughout so if you haven’t seen the film I recommend watching it first or just scroll all the way down for a TL;DR with no spoilers.

Patema Inverted is a film about a young girl named Patema who one day travels to what is called the “danger zone” and drops her backpack getting caught on a fence. A boy named Eiji sees this backpack but something isn’t right. As Patema goes to grab her backpack we see that she in fact has her gravity inverted from Eiji.

I love this premise and the world building of Patema Inverted helps to heighten that. Immediately we see how different the world Patema has lived in and the surface world of Aiga is. When Patema goes to grab her backpack she slips having to rely on Eiji to help her. When they grab onto each other we see that Eiji is actually able to get airtime because Patema is counterbalancing his weight with her own gravity. Eiji, an Aigan, is taught in school that people like Patema, the Inverted people, are sinners who will be eaten by the sky. Because of this Patema thinks that Eiji is going to do harmful things to her since he’s inverted in her perspective. I just love this idea of literal opposite perspectives as the conflict of the film, it's much different from the stereotypical villain or natural disaster occuring as a conflict and it's a breath of fresh air to say the least.

I also loved the camera work for a lack of better words. The way the animators created certain scenes were amazing. One scene in particular I absolutely loved. After Patema and Eiji grab onto each other, our perspective rotates to see the bright sun in the background with Patema and Eiji inverted from each other. This and other rotating scenes in the film made it so confusing yet spectacular to watch at the same time. When we are on the surface world in our perspective Eiji is normal and is walking on the floor while Patema is walking on the ceiling, but when we go down to where the Inverted live the camera is flipped so that the Inverted seem normal and instead Eiji is the one walking on the ceiling. These touches to the film to make us see the world in the way that Eiji and Patema do are what I absolutely adore.

Now as good as the world building and the animation is, there's something the film doesn’t build, the characters. The film shows a few scenes of backstory about our MCs throughout the movie but nothing too in-depth. The film mentions someone named Lagos who is apparently an important person to Patema. For the majority of the film we barely know anything about him besides his name and he has traveled to the surface world. The film also mentions Eiji’s dad tried to fly into the sky with what looks to be a mechanical air balloon but then was shot and fell out of it. In addition to these two supporting characters which basically provide us with nothing, the film doesn’t give us much information about Patema or Eiji so it is so hard to get attached to them. We don’t even get the main antagonists name throughout the whole movie.

TL;DR :
The idea, conflict, and animation of the film is great, however I found the characters extremely hollow and not flushed out whatsoever. Overall a good experience and a film I recommend watching if you want your mind boggled.