Clannad is one of those anime that just hit at the right place at the right time. Not only was it adapted from a famous, beloved visual novel, a fairly new production company at the time, Kyoto Animation, really made an effort to do it justice by adapting it into an anime series that bordered on having 50 episodes. Then again, by that time, KyoAni already had experience adapting the works of Visual Arts/Key into animation previously, though they actually weren't the only ones doing so. For some reason, Toei got in on it as well, though their direction was to adapt them into movies (In the case of Kanon, they made that into a 13-episode series). KyoAni stopped adapting Key's visual novels into animation after Clannad, something that didn't sit well with their fans at the time (Man, remember when JC Staff was first revealed to be making the Little Busters anime? I remember the backlash being sooooo overblown). But Toei's adaptations of Key's work had their merits, mainly making them into more bite-sized for anyone who didn't want to watch 20-50 something episodes of KyoAni's TV versions. Having seen both the Clannad TV anime and the movie, I do feel that the movie is the inferior version, but I also don't feel it should be completely overlooked.
Fans of Visual Arts/Key will already know the story, but for the uninitiated, here's a general synopsis: Tomoya Okazaki is a delinquent who goes through life in a daze, with no ambitions in life, detached from everything, and weighed down by his own personal demons. Every night, he has a strange dream that he can't explain. When he meets a young woman, Nagisa Furukawa, who asks for his help, Tomoya is at first reluctant, but humors her, as he doesn't have much to do. But the two find themselves interacting more and more, and through a series of encounters and events, they gradually become friends. Nagisa wants to start up the drama club to put on an original play, and Tomoya, along with his slacker friend Youhei Sunohara, decide to join and help her out. But Tomoya's decision to help her out becomes something far more than even he and Nagisa could have ever imagined, enriching his life.
If you're hoping the movie will be exactly like both the visual novel or the anime, you're in the wrong place. Being a movie, it can't possibly adapt the entire source material, so changes do have to be made in order to adapt it to a different medium. For one, the focus is entirely on both Tomoya and Nagisa, with characters like Kyo and Tomoyo reduced to just friends. Kotomi only gets a cameo in one scene, and characters such as Fuuko and Ryo are left out entirely. But other characters get their roles expanded, such as Kouko, who becomes the drama club adviser instead of the elderly man who does so in the game and the anime...though as much as I like Kouko being more of a stern badass than she was in the anime, did they really have to pull the whole making her move so fast that she disappears into lines like she's in some Dragonball Z show? That just felt lazy to me. Also, whose idea was it to throw in a really random scene where Sunohara urinates on-screen? That was just unnecessary. Plus, with the movie's length, it doesn't have time to flesh out any character that's not Tomoya or Nagisa. But I'll give the movie credit for knowing what to focus on and what to keep limited, as it kept the focus on what was important, leaving out subplots that would have made the movie feel bloated. It helps that the major side characters, such as Tomoyo, Sunohara, Kyo, and Nagisa's parents, do get plenty of screen time on their own, and they get just enough time devoted to them that they don't feel like one-dimensional cardboard cut outs, even taking into account their different roles and execution compared to the TV anime. Basically, the side characters do a great job supporting the main storyline without overtaking it.
As far as animation goes, the Clannad movie is obviously inferior to KyoAni's take on it, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. For one, the character designs are true to the game, and while the animation isn't as dynamic or fluid as that of the TV series, it still gets the job done. Plus, there's something else to consider: This would be the final film directed by one of anime's most famous revolutionaries, Osamu Dezaki, who made a lot of great things during his heyday. He directed famous anime like Rose of Versailles, Treasure Island, Nobody's Boy Remi, Ashita no Joe, Oniisama e, and various Lupin III specials, among many other things. He even did some animation work for, of all things, Rainbow Brite. He started up and refined a lot of cost-cutting animation techniques, such as split screens (And the Clannad movie has A LOT of them), filters, repetition of scenes—stretching them out for dramatic effect, and, one that Dezaki fans will definitely recognize, stark, heavily lined watercolor paintings to close out scenes, or enhance them for further dramatic effect. His directing style definitely won't be for everyone, and his character designs are very much unlike most anime you see nowadays. I don't have as much to say on the soundtrack, as half of it is original stuff that I barely paid attention to, and half of it is music reused from the visual novel. Both are good and fit the tone of the story very well, but that's really about it.
Going back to the characters, Tomoya and Nagisa's roles are very much reversed in the movie. Nagisa is much more assertive and confident than she is in the show, and while the change in personality does make her feel a lot less overly cutesy and moe, I felt like the movie version stripped away the more realistic character flaws that made her more three-dimensional and dynamic in the TV anime. Tomoya suffered the most, as he's a lot more angsty and brooding, often staying that way for 90% of his screentime, even those his reasons for being so are valid (Mostly, barring the dream sequences which are nothing like the anime or visual novel). Because the movie took away some of his other personality traits in favor of ramping up his angst, he loses a lot of depth and character that he had in both the visual novel and the anime, which is a shame because he's the main character!
So yeah, don't go into this expecting it to be slavishly faithful to the original source. Clannad The Movie is very much its own entity trying to stand on its own and it needed to make do with what it had in order to tell the story it needed to within its limitations. For what it is though, I like to think of it as a bite-sized version of Clannad that's perfect for people who don't want to or are unable to commit to watching the 50-episode anime. It's not the absolute best adaptation of Clannad there is, but it does have its merits, so I would recommend it as a nice little time killer for if you want a bite-sized, quiet romance to watch.
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