Dear lord, it's been a while since I sat through something that's both ugly and mind-numbingly boring. Basically, DEEMO: Memorial Keys centers on a girl named Alice who wakes up in a strange world without her memories. She befriends the world's residents: A stick-figure man named Deemo, a talking cat doll named Mirai, a nutcracker, and a sentient fragrant sachet, but does want to go back home. They discover that whenever Deemo plays the piano, the music makes a tree grow, which might just be the thing that'll help Alice get home. There's also a side plot about an older Alice befriending two girls at a music academy and trying to remember a song she used to play. DEEMO: Memorial Keys is actually based on a Taiwanese mobile game. I know nothing about said game, so my review will be entirely about just the movie, and I'm going to be frank, I really didn't like this.

Mainly because DEEMO as a movie just feels like it's blatantly ripping off other stuff that have tackled its premise and subject matter way better. Girl gets sucked into a world with no memories. Girl makes magical friends who want to help her. Girl has to deal with an adversary who she eventually befriends. Girl's issues and fantastical journey wind up being tied to trauma involving losing a family member. All of this has been done before, and better, in other stuff, and it would be one thing if DEEMO made an effort to flesh out its story and characters, because doing that much can make an audience invested in your product even if the premise is cliche. I'm of the philosophy that even if something has been done before, as long as you put effort into what you create and have relatable, interesting characters, you can still make something good.

But DEEMO doesn't even try to do that much, because to put it frankly, none of its characters are even remotely interesting or well-developed in any way whatsoever. All of them have just one main personality trait, making them all as bland as potatoes. Alice literally has nothing to her, especially teenaged Alice, and the producers really laid on the "Sad Girl. Feel bad" vibe on Alice really thick, but it really doesn't work, because she has no other traits other than being a kid, liking music, and having amnesia, so the audience has no real reason to be invested in her. Even the friends she makes at the music academy just feel like they were tacked onto the movie so it can pad it out to 90 minutes. Speaking of padding things out, the movie has a lot of really pointless sequences that just go on for way too long, like an unneeded roller coaster ride. The toy characters and their antics just drag the movie on for way longer than it needed. I feel like DEEMO as a movie should have been 45 minutes long.

And do I even need to mention the God-awful animation? Seriously, whose bright idea was it to make this movie all CGI, because it looks ugly as hell. The backgrounds are fine, but the characters and the movement look so stiff, unexpressive, and bland that they look like they came straight out of a bad TV show from the 2000s. It really says a lot when the Jimmy Neutron TV series looks better than this. The weird thing is, there are some brief moments of 2D animation, usually involving cats, and those brief shots look better than the rest of the movie! I know Japan has a weird history with CGI, but they've been getting a lot better with it in their most recent outputs, like Lupin The First and Trigun Stampede! For a movie that was released in theaters, DEEMO's bad animation feels more in line with a movie some company made for a straight-to-DVD product, and that should not be! This is especially strange considering the video game it's based on has much better artwork and some really amazing watercolor backgrounds!

I already mentioned how piss-poor the story is, mainly because it just rehashes a bunch of tropes from other movies, but DEEMO is especially egregious with this because it has this whole vibe that it thinks it's good at making you cry and sympathize with the characters, but any attempt at drama just comes off as shallow and cheesy due to just throwing them all into a blender and expecting it to be palatable as is. Because it doesn't want to explore the depths of Alice's issues beyond "fantasy world is just Alice's dream" and wanting to put a neat little bow on everything at the end, DEEMO just comes off as a third-rate children's movie about coping with loss. And from what I've heard, the movie seriously screws up in its adaptation of the game, which is covered in detail in an AniList review a user by the name of Beam wrote. Definitely check out that review, because Beam, who played the game, actually goes into detail about how DEEMO as a movie fails as an adaptation of the video game and the various ways in which it screwed up in doing so, far better than I could ever hope to achieve.

So yeah, DEEMO: Memorial Keys is not only a mind-numbingly boring movie on its own, as an adaptation it seriously misses the point of the game it's trying to adapt, making it little more than yet another cliche children's movie. Seriously, there are so many other media out there that tackle the subjects of death and overcoming trauma without trying to resolve everything as neatly and cheesily as possible like DEEMO does, such as Night World, My Little Goat, A Space For The Unbound, Land of the Lustrous, Gift of the Magi (Manga, not the short story by O. Henry), pretty much everything in the World Masterpiece Theater, and so much more. Those are much more worth your time than DEEMO: Memorial Keys will ever be.