Pompo: The Cinéphile

Pompo: The Cinéphile is a movie which asserts itself a sort of love letter to film and the craft as a whole, in the story we follow there main characters the titular character Pompo is a young movie producer who has taken the reigns from her grandfather to direct cheap B-movies for 'Nyallywood' .'Gene Fini' is her seemingly overworked, movie-obsessed assistant whos dream is is to see a movie of his creation be made and finally 'Natalie Woodward' who is an aspiring actor who probably has some dream other than being famous but it's not really presented as much more than to help Gene achieve his goal.

Pompo takes a chance with gene and writes and produces seemly her first 'serious' high-budget movie and picks Gene to direct this project, we follow the process from beginning to end.

As someone like myself who loves films and the movie-making process, I thought this would be exactly my kind of movie, for context I watch over 600+ none anime movies last year alone.

But right about here is really where the film kind of starts to sort of lose me because it really doesn't ever actually go into the nitty gritty of making a film but instead, just vague shows it in feckless anime-styled analogy and really more becomes a movie about "never giving up on your dreams" or "believe in yourself"

The movie they are making is mostly unimportant and we only are actually shown a sort of vague and generic plot about a musical who obsesses over his work and takes it too far ostracizing his family and friends in the process.

A FIlm that I think actually managed to do a really good job at what Pompo: The Cinéphile tried to do was Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald which is about a production of a live radio show except for everything that can go wrong does go wrong in Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald the production is the central focal point for the story we care about the actual plot of the movie and how its being produced.

and similarly to Pompo: The Cinéphile it keeps a chaotic and hectic style that actually translates into the film rather than ultimately being a series of obnoxious and distracting editing and cuts within the film (in a Meta sort of way)

Oh the editing cuts I guess this is a belief rather than a rule but to quote God from futurama "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." this is a belief that I firmly think should apply to movie editing and that this movie does not, it wants you to be aware of every single cut and edit it makes its 'meta' in a sort of way and I guess this sort of works as the final climax of the film is Gene desperately trying to edit his film down to an acceptable length starting from a staggering 72 hours of film (which must include multiple takes right?)

except we don't actually get to see what cuts and sacrifices he makes for the film while still retaining his vision nothing is shown and we were never invested in the internal film enough to care even if we were shown. as one point we go 'full-anime' when his cuts are visualized with film physically cutting and attacking giant film stock with a sword.

We have a small B-Plot near the back half of the movie which involves one of Gene's former highschool classmates 'Alan Gardner' who now works for a large bank the movie Gene is directing and his passion for it reignites Alan's own ambitions in life when the film needs additional funding, we go full movie logic where in he makes an impassioned speech to try and get the funding but the board of executives are not convinced they are cold and only see the logistical numbers in finance he then surprises them by live steaming the board room meeting (something something two party consent laws) and a crowdfunding campaign (so if you have the numbers why not show them in the first place) but it's still not enough for the suits that is until his passion makes his way to the CEO notice who comes down to overrule the old businessmen and his better business sense for this young man's passion (this is not how billionaires stay billionaires) is very sappy and predictable in a movie logic sort of way instead playing out in a potentially more mature 'grounded' way.

I know most of this review sounds quite negative and it has been but there are some things I liked but really just don't feel confident enough to explain in detail, I don't have that much of an eye for animation so I could not say what makes it look good but overall I did like the look and motion in the animation the style reminded me of something maybe Bones or Trigger (minus the craziness) would produce.

I also enjoyed the character designed I like the more 'realistic style' with the exception of Pompo, which really make this movie feel more like a movie than typical 'anime movies'

Overall I thought the movie was okay but the plot falls far from expectations and instead of delivering a the promise of a "love letter to cinema" falls in too much more generic trappings instead not a bad movie just not something very original or exciting either.

Thank you for reading my review of Pompo: The Cinéphile I'm sorry for how unstructured and messy of a review I maybe compared to other higher-quality reviews on this site, this is the first time writing a review for any anime before, I hope to improve and be able to express my opinions better in future.