This review will contain spoilers.

Bubble was one of the anime I looked a lot forward to in 2022. With Urobuchi as scriptwriter, Sawano for the music and Araki as director the staff looked very promising, and the trailer were pretty good. If it would’ve been screened in cinema, I would’ve gone to watch it. However, the end result fell very short on the expectations and overall this movie left me with unsatisfied, and partly confused.

The main theme of this movie is “destruction and restoration”. Approached is this theme in multiple ways. We have a world in near future where bubbles rained all over in the world. Through an explosion with Tokyo as its epicentre, Tokyo is left in a destroyed state, where everything is overflooded and instable, due to the bubbles being still there and having unique properties when comes to gravitation. The only inhabitants which remain in this area are mostly kids which became orphans (Yes, it was only said once and never mentioned again) because of that explosion and feel suffocated in the outside world. Inside this area they formed groups competing with each other. They may have lost a place where they belong to through the explosion, but it gave them a new place to belong to.

The bubbles itself also embody the theme of destruction and restoration. They are even used in art as a symbol for life, because they are beautiful, but fragile at the same time. When bursting however they never disappear, they simply become water. Using bubbles as a thematic symbol we have a romance plot, where our main protagonist Hibiki connects with a bubble, which takes on human form and is called “Uta”. Uta loves Hibiki, but even if she desires to be with him she’s unable to physically touch him, because if she does she risks disintegrating into bubbles again. However, in the end she overcomes her fear and decides to save him nonetheless: And even after seeming to have disappeared at first, she merely disintegrated into bubbles, calls back to the cycle of destruction and restoration, and comforts Hibiki, that they may have a shot at meeting again.

It’s certainly not a bad theme, but it was ambitious. Maybe too ambitious, because the movie ended up underdeveloped in several aspects. The biggest concern is the worldbuilding. I already added a small comment that them being orphans is only mentioned once, but that’s only one of the several issues the worldbuilding in this movie have. The bubbles are never properly explained. We don’t know whether the bubbles are a species on their own or if there are simply a natural phenomenon, and Hibiki gave a bubble life through interacting with it (although this is makes less sense than the former because Uta has a “sister” apparently). We don’t know why the bubble assault for the rest of the Blue Blazers suddenly stopped when Hibiki reaches the observatory, and why Uta is able to influence the bubbles to such an extent. There are also small shenanigans like the past being recorded up in the observatory, but for the sake of narrative I was fine with that kind of stuff.

My main problem lies that fundamentals are unexplained and leaves the viewer with a lot of questions. The movie also never really explored much why the kids are drawn to Tokyo, and the fact that they are orphans is also just thrown into the room and never ended up subject for exploration. Maybe they could’ve cut the “villains” we got half-way into the movie, because they weren’t really important besides for the sake of some action and drama. I have no idea how the plot was written of course, but it stood out to me that we have 3 scriptwriters in total for this anime. It wouldn’t surprise me, if the narrative ended up so incohesive and incomplete, because we had 1-2 writers too many.

In other aspects however, the movie has its charms and depending on what you look for in a standalone movie it can still end up as an entertaining watch. The camerawork is simply incredible, I was very impressed that the CGI was done by several outsourcing companies but still was used so well and frequently. And most of the time it meshed well with the 2D foreground animation, even if it has its janky moments. In some scenes the composite was wonderful though, for example in this cut animated by Satoshi Sakai:

The animation in general was very solid through-out the whole movie, with Kyoji Asano and Takaaki Chiba as lead animators, both big names who worked for example a lot on the first three seasons of Attack on Titan. And I don't think it's a surprise that Sawano didn't disappoint with the score, I will say though that he hasn't really done anything memorable here. I don't think I will listen to Bubble's soundtrack outside of the movie but I enjoyed it while watching.

In conclusion, Bubble is a good-looking movie with an ambitious attempt at handling a very interesting concept within a standalone movie. In my opinion however, it ended up underdeveloped because of that and is as a whole rather disappointing. Thank you for reading my review, and feel free to criticize any point I made in this review. I only watched the movie once so it's possible that I have misinterpreted something or missed detail. I'm open for discussion in that regard.