Let me briefly get you up to speed. Spy x Family is an action-comedy anime/manga about an impossibly skilled spy, Loid, having to adopt a kid in order to infiltrate a prestigious high class school. The child he adopts, Anya, is a survivor of an unknown lab’s experiments – experiments that gave her the power to read minds – so consequentially Anya knows Loid’s secret. Anya is ecstatic to be adopted by a spy, though – in her mind, spys are incredibly exciting. In order to not draw suspicions, Loid meets and proposes a fake marriage to a woman named Yor. Yor agrees -- unbeknownst to Loid, Yor is an impossibly skilled assassin, who needs a family to dodge the government’s scrutiny. After Anya does well in her classes, Loid and Yor decide to let her adopt a dog – and of course, the dog turns out to be capable of seeing the future. Anya, Loid, Yor, and even the dog have reasons to keep their professions secret from the rest of the family – and so with that premise, Spy x Family has so far delivered two seasons (season 1 being a two-cour affair) to immense buzz and both critical and commercial success. So it’s natural that a highly popular anime would eventually receive a feature film.

With any popular anime, there typically is a companion film of some kind. These can fall into three main categories – recap films, adaptions of canon material, and non-canon movies that effectively serve as their own self-contained story arcs. Spy x Family falls into the third category: namely, a non-canon self contained story arc. It’s genuinely exciting to see a series go from a manga, to two anime seasons, to a video game, and now to a movie. Regardless of the movie’s quality, it feels like a rite of passage for a series like this to get a movie. Tatsuya Endo can sleep soundly knowing his series has finally “made it.” Doubly so knowing that Spy x Family: Code White is as unambitious as it is, TRULY meeting the standards of an anime companion movie.

Spy x Family: Code White feels like it’s filling out a checklist, trying to hit all the most popular notes of the main series: Anya remarks that something is “so exciting,” (WAKU WAKU!!), Yor gets drunk, a romantic moment between Yor and Loid is interrupted by a violent slap from an embarrassed Yor, Yuri remarks about how much he loves his sister, Nightfall gets her anguished and fruitless declaration of love to Loid, and Bond predicts a future where Yor cooks a horrible meal. I have to give the directors credit, though; they did manage to keep the peanut references to a minimum. It’s not that these elements are a negative in and of itself, but the aggressive prevalence of them (especially in the first half) definitely lends to a feeling of being phoned in. It feels like it was designed to fill out a Spy x Family themed bingo card, it's kind of ridiculous. How is everything ELSE, though?

The answer is mostly good. The story follows the Forger families weekend vacation to a foreign country in order to taste-test and eventually bake a specific foreign desert for the school’s principal in order to win a Stella. So, right off the bat you’re aware that they will not be successful in this goal – can’t have the movie interrupting canon! Somewhere along the line, Anya unwittingly gets herself involved with a criminal conspiracy and becomes a target for the bad guys, so naturally Yor and Loid have to protect Anya while attempting to foil the enemy plot and all the while keeping their identity a secret from each other. It is truly just another Spy x Family arc.

One minor complaint I have is in the form of a question: who is this movie for, really? There is an overly long poop joke that is – for whatever reason – VERY well animated and stylistically different from the rest of the movie’s animation. It’s most similar to Anya’s iconic dodgeball throw in Season 1, except it’s dedicated to a joke that just isn’t all that funny and is incredibly juvenile. Which is fine, generally speaking. The movie is a family movie, for the most part. Except, well, is it? At the beginning of the movie, Yor violently slashes a man’s throat and blood dramatically spurts out of his wound as he dies, which would suggest this isn’t a movie for all ages – and then the remaining runtime’s violence is mostly bloodless and often non-lethal. At several points in the movie, though, Anya is in danger of being brutally murdered – which, to be fair, is not ground untouched by Spy x Family – but all of this together does put it in an odd place where it’s both too blatantly uninspired and juvenile for older audiences and too adult for younger audiences. You could make this argument for the series as a whole, but I oddly don’t have much of a problem with that range in the main series -- so maybe my issue lies solely with the humor in question being toilet humor. Either way, this tonal dissonance isn’t going to be a problem for those familiar with the main series (which I assume will be everyone watching this – with the notably hilarious exception of participants in a recent AMC Film Unseen event that was met with a massive number of walkouts). If you know what you’re in for, there will be no surprises here.

...and to be clear, I mean exactly that. There are no surprises here. If you expect anything out of a Spy x Family arc, it will be in this movie. There are extremely well choreographed fights that Yor and Loid participate in – as an aside, there’s one exceptionally well animated Yor fight between her and a masked and armored machine gun wielding mystery man. At one point the mask comes off and dramatically reveals that the man under the mask was...some guy. I adore this. I’ve seen it happen in Yakuza, too – we need more unmaskings that reveal that we don’t even know that guy. Nothing more than a confirmation that the guy has facial features. I mean it, no surprises to a silly degree. The Loid fights in here are also very fun and well animated – fun uses of color as well. Loid and Yor are both comically busted characters and as long as you promise not to give a damn it’s pretty much purely inoffensive fun.

It’s hard for me to feel like this movie wasn’t a bit of a missed opportunity. Spy x Family’s recent run of chapters have shown nothing but reluctance toward the notion of shaking up the series’ status quo. With the success of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, The First Slam Dunk, and the highly anticipated Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc movie, I would suggest that adapting canon content may be the most surefire way for a shonen anime film to be successful, but considering the lack of meaningful progress in the manga as of the time of writing I can completely understand the decision to go with an original here. It’s such a shame that they did so little with it. I feel like Spy x Family has never had particularly engaging antagonists and I feel like Code White would’ve been an excellent opportunity to create anything other than an archetypal “bad guy” for the Forgers to fight. There was definitely room for something special here – but what we got was a respectable throwaway film from Wit Studio and Cloverworks. It’s okay. Good job.

55/100