For the people who don't want to read the full review, The Anthem of the Heart is a movie with very good characters, okay visuals, and a mostly good plot, aside from one really cliché and pointless plot point that could have been cut with nothing lost and would have given more time to give us closure with the characters. Overall, I still think it was really good. 9/10 / 90/100
Spoilers below!
I don't typically do this with my reviews, but I'm going to split the review into Visuals, Characters and Plot because unlike a show I think it'll be easier to talk about these seperately.
The Visuals
The visuals of The Anthem of the Heart are... underwhelming. I don't watch a lot of movies, but coming off of movies like Penguin Highway and Sunny Boy and Dewdrop Girl, I couldn't help but think so many times in this movie "The visuals are kinda boring." There's one scene that I do like the visuals of, which is the second egg scene
I think the visual of her standing in a sea of egg yolk was pretty cool, but that's about it for visuals. Like, I get that it's set in a high school but the next most visually interesting scene I wasn't thinking about the visuals because I was thinking about how bad the scene was.The Characters
Quick overview: Jun is great, Takumi is fine, Nito is good, Daiki is probably the best character in the film, the supporting cast is all great as well.
Jun: As someone who loves characters who are mute, I knew I was going to love Jun. Her body language is cute, the way she shows people her phone to talk to them is cute, and when she sang while Takumi and Ikkun (That's what Yoko refers to him as I can't remember his real name) were fighting? CHEF'S KISS. IMMACULATE.
Takumi: He feels bland to me, objectively he had a distinct personality but he gets outshined by the other main characters.
Nito: Nito isn't actually interesting on her own, but she's interesting in relation to the other characters. Through her we learn that Takumi was going through tough shit, which is explained later when Jun asks Takumi's grandma about what happened to his parents. She also feels the most human out of the characters (though all of the characters feel real), like when she's arguing with Takumi and saying how she knows that he likes Jun (wrong) or how she's angry when she sees Yoko and Ikkun making out while everyone's working hard (even though she wants to do that to Takumi).
Daiki: Daiki is framed to be a bad guy for the first like half an hour ish but it was really obvious to me that he wasn't actually bad and it was just circumstances. He has the most development out of the cast, realizing that the things he'd been saying were like not okay and that almost everyone on the team hates him. Not that the things they said about him were okay but it's an everyone's in the wrong typa deal here.
The Plot
It's mostly solid, I'm only really going to talk about my favourite and least favourite scene but to give a quick rundown: Our four main characters are put on the Community Outreach Committee and they decide (with a big push from the music teacher) to put on a musical. Jun writes the musical about her loss of words, is cast as the main character, and then ditches last second because she hears Takumi say that she doesn't love her when she loves him. They bring her back hella late but she gets to sing her number about not being able to speak specifically, Daiki x Jun and Takumi x Nito becomes canon and the movie ends.
So, there's this one scene where they're at a diner, it's the first time they're discussing the plan to put on a musical with Nito and Daiki, but that's really not what the scene is about. So, this scene is basically just coming off of Takumi telling Daiki that the people on the baseball team don't like him because all he does is shit talk them and Daiki and Ikkun are like "you don't know shit" but lo and behold
So obviously, Daiki confronts them, the unnamed ones immediately apologize. When Daiki confronts them, he doesn't actually mention what they said about him, he's more mad that they shittalked the new captain, Mishima. Daiki doesn't really care about the apologies and him and Yamaji have some back and forth and Yamaji ends up lashing out, and this happens. (If you're this far into the review and you haven't seen the movie please go watch it because the screenshots I'm about to lay out are so much better if you experience them with sound.)
This scene is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO important because it's like literally the core message of the movie. Inori Minase (who you might know as Rem from Re:Zero or Aries Spring from Astra Lost in Space) gives an amazing performance in this scene, I literally had goosebumps when I first watched it holy shit it was good.
And now for... the bad scene
So this takes place towards the end of the movie when Jun ditches the musical and Takumi goes to find her. She ends up going to the Castle at the top of the hill, a love hotel and a place the musical references. The actual contents of the scene on their end are fine, it doesn't really add much to the plot, we didn't need a nine minute scene to tell us that Jun was upset that Takumi didn't love her back but sure, whatever. What I really don't like is the cliché of "It's the big day and the lead is gone we can't do the performance without her!" like that's so boring.
At first I thought this was done to give Sora Amimiya, the voice actor of Nito, a singing role, but this was a manga adaptation and not an original film so that doesn't really add up. I think the author was trying to parallel an earlier scene where originally the story had a sad ending but Jun changed it to a happy one? And Jun was going to have a sad ending in real life but then Takumi found her and she had a happy one? That's the only thing I can think of but that's a stretch I really don't know why they couldn't have just made the musical go normally because then we would have had like 15 spare minutes to give characters closure, AND Jun can still sing the number where she says "Losing my voice brought joy to all because they hated the words I once spoke." In fact, Jun's mom realizing the play is about her family doesn't even hinge on Jun singing at all because she realizes when Nito is still playing the princess and Daiki, dressed as the egg, says "So you've lost the ability to speak! This is the punishment for your crimes. This is everyone's wish, for you to lose your voice!"
Conclusion
Yeah that one scene sucks lol but the rest is pretty sick. 9/10