This review contain spoilers.

The first thing I'd like to make clear in this review is that it is going to be really about my personal experience watching the movie rather than an "objective" analysis. This is important because I feel that if had watched this in another moment of my life or even in a different mood, perhaps I would have liked it way more.

The thing is, I'm absolutely crazy for Masaaki Yuasa works. All the anime he directed are extremely expressive, and it usually involves more mature themes, such as "Ping Pong The Animation", that breaks the classic shounen structure for sports anime and adds a deeper and thought-provoking reflection on effort vs talent, "Tatami Galaxy", that brilliantly expresses a coming of age drama about enjoying youth with a sharp comedy attached to it, or even "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken", that explores the hard work and creativity processes that goes into animation with unusual ways of expressing those processes. The character designs, the animations, the soundtracks, and overall the art direction are always memorable and the exact opposite of what one would call "generic".

So, needless to say, I went into this movie with gigantic expectations and really excited on what Masaaki could do with a romance setup, especially since I've been repeatedly disappointed with several romance anime before. My first impressions on the art, the characters and the style couldn't be better, it's so satisfying how they can make everything and everyone so beautiful without resorting to a more traditional anime art style.

And for the first 40 minutes, I was a perfect movie. Being able to enjoy a realistic, mature and yet sensitive romance anime that does not involve teenagers in high school making stupid decisions was like a spiritual cleansing for me and the scene where Minato - the boy main character - dies broke my heart in such a way that I had to pause the movie to process what had happened. At this moment I imagined that the rest of the movie was going to be about grief and how Hinako - the girl main character - was going to learn to "ride her own wave" by letting go and moving forward. And it was about that, kind of, but definitely not the way I was expecting it to be.

I'll admit that as ambitious and innovative as it is, the science fiction "ghost thing" that takes place in the second half of the movie was really hard for me to enjoy, and that's because I feel like it changes the approach the movie had on independence and growing up from a direct way to a more symbolic one, using the ghost of Minato and the flood scenes as a tool to represent what I was expecting the movie to represent directly with dialogs and introspective reflections of Hinako. Seeing all of this action-ish moments were kind of frustrating, and spent the last third of the movie really wishing that it was somehow just a hallucination rather than an actual ghost speaking to Hinako, although that would've been even worse, probably.

But overall I understood the message and as I said, it was a really clever and unusual way to portray those themes. If there's one thing I'm absolutely sure is that this is a Masaaki Yausa movie, but for me, maybe it was too unusual. I still had a great time watching it and definitely recommend.