
a review by LinClick

a review by LinClick
Name: Over the Sky
Type: Movie
Duration: 95 mins
Studio: Digital Network Animation
Director: Yoshinobu Sena
#Alright, Let’s start.

Summary:
Mio, a careless and lazy girl, is the type that takes life as it comes. One day, Mio’s friend Madoka reveals she has feelings for Mio’s childhood friend. Not used to confronting problems, Mio tells Madoka that she has her full support while denying her own feelings. On one of her usual day outs with Arata, Mio gets into a fight with him. That night as she was rushing to apologize to him, she got into a car accident. When she woke up, she was on a train to a magical world with flying whales and penguins, and other fantasy-like elements. But it turns out that the world is the border between life and death. With the help of a talking plushie and a mysterious girl, will she be able to go back to her world?

Art:
Just ok I guess. Nothing much special. Even though it was a 2020 release, the art makes it feel older.
The color is really bright, so much that it hurts your eyes at times. But during the gloomy scenes, art takes such a step back that it seems to almost be from the 1900s.
The linework is… also just ok. It is quite thin but sometimes too prominent.
At times when the camera is zoomed out to cover a wide view, the smaller details just seem to disappear.

Animation:
Smooth. But only most of the time.
The mouth movement is weird. It tends to skip the animation and just directly change shapes. Sometimes it also stays frozen, like when she laughs.

Story:
Plot:- Interesting. But that's about it. Otherwise it just seems too much like a fantasy without seeming like a fantasy. It doesn’t have anything good. Just a lot of “stuff” is all it seems like. There’s nothing amazing about it.
Storytelling:- Bad. Like that’s it. Just bad. It doesn’t hook you in at all. Sure it has got emotion. Only thing is, the watchers don’t feel it. Quite a bit of crying scenes and sad ones but at one scene where she was crying from despair, it sounded like unholy screaming… and it also doesn't make the watcher any sadder than their choice of watching it.
There is also a lot of unneeded suspense. Like they only have her confess her feelings at the end and even that they make us guess since they don’t give her any audio.
The music scene also seems very forced. At the beginning, it is just useless stuff in the background with her singing and only gets better later. Even then, the song sounds like a cross of japanese and chinese and the singer has become an old woman sometimes.

Character:
It looks as if they put in some effort at least. This is honestly one of the few good parts of it.
However, as for the villain… he is given a face reveal only in the third quarter or something, but he actually becomes a good guy at the end. This would usually be ok, but they went as far as to turn him into a monster and chase Mio like a zombie at one point so it really doesn’t feel good.

15.5 out of 17 users liked this review