Picture the following scenario: you stumble across a show or movie you’ve never heard of. You have no idea what it’s about, but it looks interesting, so you go in with no expectations and hope you’re in for a decent time. As you watch it, it wins you over more and more, hitting all the right notes at all the right moments, accomplishing cinematic feats you’ve never really seen anywhere before. Eventually, things get so damn good that you’re convinced you stumbled across an unappreciated masterpiece. “Why doesn’t anybody talk about this anymore?” you wonder. “This should be a cult classic on everyone’s lips!” And then you cross into the final stretch, and suddenly, things take a turn for the worse. Not disastrously so, but enough to viciously yank you out of the blissful trance you were just in. By the time it’s over, you no longer wonder why this piece of media wasn’t popular enough to linger in the public consciousness. And while you still had a fantastic time with it, you’re also left with the bitter disappointment of knowing it was almost something truly special. That is the experience I just had with Welcome to the Space Show, an anime film from 2010 that comes so agonizingly close to being amazing, but stumbles into just being really damn good instead.

The story begins on earth, following a group of five elementary school kids in a rural Japanese village as they head out for a self-run summer camp. Natsuki is a rambunctious sixth grader with dreams of being a hero, Amane’s her younger cousin who’s still mad at her for losing their pet rabbit, Kouji dreams of being a space scientist one day, Kiyoshi’s the sensible older one who acts as their teacher/counselor, and Noriko’s just happy to be included. Together they make quite the rambunctious friend group, but their summer antics take a turn for the weird when they find a talking dog injured in the woods. Turns out he’s actually an alien named Pochi, and as thanks for saving his life, he offers to take them on a trip to space to see all the crazy shenanigans going on just outside Earth’s gaze. Pretty soon, the kids are on a fantastical adventure through alien planets, galactic cities, and all sorts of wild and imaginative setpieces that director Kouki Masunari probably had bouncing around in his head for a while. Meanwhile, the mysterious bad guys who injured Pochi in the first place are still hot on his trail, and it won’t be long before the kids get wrapped up in a much bigger story than a simple sightseeing tour.

It’s a pretty simple setup for a family-friendly sci-fi flick, and you won’t find too much creativity in the story beats to come. What you will find, though, is one of the most gorgeous, entertaining kids’ adventure movies this side of Studio Ghibli. From start to finish, Welcome to the Space show bombards you with imagery the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Giant space stations the size of the moon, living interplanetary bullet trains reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro’s Catbus on acid, alien designs ranging from adorable to insane, nebulas and supernovas and antimatter fields, and enough surreal art-deco/freeform aesthetics to put Masaaki Yuasa himself to shame. And all of it’s brought to life with consistently jaw-dropping animation, bowling you over with overwhelming awe and wonder on a near-constant basis. Nor does it skimp on the subtler character details either; the way these kids emote and dance through this off-the-rails vision of interstellar civilization grounds all the wild imagination in a real sense of tangible believability. This is one of the best-looking anime A-1 pictures has ever produced, even a decade later. I could spend ages poring through every frame in this movie and never run out of moments of visual spectacle to take my breath away.

But it’s the cast that really brings this whole movie together. While the kids are all fairly simple as characters, their interactions with the world and each other take Welcome to the Space Show to a whole new level. It’s so much damn fun watching them work their way through this world, bouncing off each other, marveling at each new setpiece with the same childlike wonder you’re likely feeling yourself. And when it comes time for the dramatic stuff to kick in, it fucking nails it. Natsuki and Amane’s family bond forms the emotional core of this movie, and watching them both struggle to reconnect with each other without knowing how makes for some of the most beautiful stuff in the entire film. Somehow, amid all the crazy visuals and stunning imagery, this simple story of family and friendship in the face of hardship ends up outshining its all. There’s an all-is-lost moment at the end of the second act that ripped my heart out of my chest and left me outright sobbing in my seat. I never expected this movie to hit this hard when I started it, but god damn if it didn’t get its claws into me. And by the time it started heading into the climax, I was fully prepared to call Welcome to the Space Show an outright masterpiece.

So what went wrong? Well, sadly, this movie’s final act is done in by one serious flaw: the plot. Once the movie has to become about the bad guys and their master plan, the story gets completely lost. It introduces big, overcomplicated concepts without adequate buildup, it rushes character relationships that haven’t had time to develop, and it starts throwing so many confusing Proper Nouns at you all at once that I lost track of what was even going on. I still don’t understand the bad guys’ big plan, or how they were trying to accomplish it, or even what their overall ideology was. The final battle tries to set up these big themes involving eugenics and scientific morality and evolution, but it all just boils down to characters yelling random, disconnected philosophy at each other while blasting lasers at each other, and it’s just impossible to follow. There’s still fantastic character moments and stunning animation throughout the big climax, but the more it becomes about that incomprehensible plot, the harder it is to stay invested in what’s going on. It transforms from a truly wonderful adventure flick into a rushed, half-baked storytelling soup that’s crushed under the weight of its own ambition. The fact it actually ends really strong is nothing short of a miracle after how badly this final act drove it off the rails.

And that sucks, because I really wanted to love this movie with all my heart. In a lot of ways, I do! Its best parts are more than worthy of standing beside the best of Miyazaki, Hosoda, Shinkai, and any other legendary director you can namedrop. But that final act really drags it down right when it seemed poise to cement its status as one of the all-time greats. I still highly recommend it, as its strengths are more than enough to make up for its stumbles, and you’re almost guaranteed to have a wonderful time with it. Welcome to the Space Show is a really, really good movie. It’s just not a masterpiece, and the frustration knowing of how close it came to being one is going to stick with me for a long time to come.