First of all – yes, this is a Project Sekai movie. The characters (excluding the titular Miku and her virtual singer friends) are from Project SEKAI: Colorful Stage! ft. Hatsune Miku, a Japanese rhythm game developed by Colorful Palette and published by Sega in Japan in 2020. The game was localized in English as Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage! and given a worldwide release the following year. Unlike the Project DIVA series, Project Sekai focuses heavily on its original characters, of which there are many – and all the relevant ones are featured in this movie. And just to get this out of the way: This movie only licenses the Crypton Future Media voicebanks – aka KAITO, MEIKO, Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin and Len, and Megurine Luka. GUMI, Flower and friends miss the party, as do all of the SynthV offerings. Confused by all this? The main takeaway is that this movie does feature 6 of the most popular vocal synths we love, but there are a lot of original characters (literally 20) from the games that are prominently featured as well.

So – the logical question is – if you’re not a Project Sekai fan, should you watch this movie at all? As someone who has never been involved in the fandom, but has been a massive VOCALOID (we’ll return to this phrase later) fan for over a decade now, I think the answer is that it depends entirely on what you’re looking for. To be absolutely clear, this movie is about Miku, and to P.A. Works’ credit, thankfully mostly about her, and less so about the video game characters. I entered this film with the perspective that I frankly didn’t know very much about the massive cast of OCs, and still mostly enjoyed it despite this lack of knowledge. But if you’re going into this looking for the nuts and bolts of voice synth production, you’ll be mostly disappointed. This is a movie that has a typical story – and the focus is more on that story than the frankly impressive cast of actual vocal-Ps that contributed to its score. As someone who is not a native Project Sekai fan, my general takeaway is that you absolutely should watch this if you are, and while it’s perhaps slightly less enjoyable if you’re like me and coming in without prior knowledge of the original characters, you should have a good time regardless.

Phew. I intend for this review to be mostly free of plot spoilers, so let’s take a very quick look first at the basics. In the animation department, it’s pretty good. The animation is nice and fluid, and while there were no scenes that absolutely wow’d me, I appreciated the thought that went into the character and backgrounds, though there were a few of the latter that felt a bit more low-effort. There is some odd use of CGI (controversial I know) but thankfully it’s not incredibly sustained. Sound design is hard to comment on as I saw it in theater – but frankly I think some scenes were just way too loud compared with the rest of the score – not sure if this was an artifact of my specific production but I’d hope this is fixed if we get a home release.

This is normally the point in the review where I’d talk about the voice acting, and it was my single biggest takeaway from the film. All the original characters were voiced by human voice actors, both for their spoken lines and also their musical appearances. Most of the performances were solid, but I was unexpectedly really impressed by Noguchi Ruriko (VA for Hoshino Ichika), whose performance was definitely the standout for me. Again – I’m not at all familiar with the games, and frankly don’t have anything notable to say about her characterization – but I was genuinely impressed by her vocal performance. However, I have less nice things to say about the rest of the characters – the vocal synths themselves.

For the uninitiated, all of the “Virtual Singers,” the six characters mentioned in the first paragraph, are pieces of software. If you take a look at this film’s credits, you’ll see the base vocalist credited for each of the Virtual Singers: Fujita Saki for Miku, Shimoda Asami for Kagamine Rin and Len, Asakawa Yuu for Megurine Luka, Haigou Meiko for MEIKO, and Fuuga Naoto for KAITO. But, importantly, these humans did not directly voice any of their characters’ songs or lines in the film. While the base vocals were provided by these human voice actors, it’s up to a “producer” or a “VOCALOID-Producer” or “vocal-p” – a human – to construct the actual words that you hear in a song. Really, there’s three players involved in the creation of a Hatsune Miku song: Fujita Saki, the human who provided Miku’s base vocals, Crypton Future Media, the company that has produced the Hatsune Miku synthesizer software, and the human vocal-p themselves, who uses the software to put the vocals together to make Hatsune Miku sing. Thus, it’s entirely clear that the quality of these six characters’ lines hinges entirely on the person, the vocal-p, between the software and the output. You can think of the vocal-p as the musician that turns the instrument – aka Hatsune Miku – into the music she sings and the lines she speaks. And oh boy, do I have something to say about the latter.

To be frank, the tuning for all six of these characters’ spoken lines is probably some of the worst that I’ve ever heard in over 10 years of listening to this genre. To be clear – this is entirely subjective. Different people appreciate different “tuning” styles: the distinctive mark that each producer leaves on their virtual singer. But, in my opinion, the tuning exhibited for all of the spoken lines is so rudimentary it’s distracting. Most of their voices suffer from sounding extremely choppy, not just in a few places but consistently throughout the entire film. I know, I know – these are SINGING voice synthesizers, and they’re not primarily marketed as TALKING voice synthesizers. But you don’t need to listen to a ton of this music to understand that people have spent 18 years making Miku and her friends sound incredible when just speaking lines, and it’s absolutely flummoxing to me to think P.A. Works couldn’t have found someone with a little more experience to tune their licensed characters. That’s really it – the Virtual Singers just sound bad when they’re talking, which, unfortunately, is much of the film.

And here’s the really frustrating part – the studio (intelligently) sourced all of its score from established producers. The opening is fantastic production by two of the most longstanding, accomplished Hatsune Miku producers 40mP and sasakure.UK. These p’s styles mesh extremely well together – I’m actually listening to the OP as I write this review and I’m reminded why these two are rightly respected as much as they are. And – get this – there are SIX, yes, SIX songs by the face of modern Miku music – DECO*27 himself, all of which are arranged by other vocal-Ps, including my personal favorite, Giga. P.A. Works was clearly smart enough to know that they should contract, you know, actual vocal-Ps to create their movie’s music, but somehow not smart enough to find a premier tuner to actually tune the six Cryptonloids’ spoken lines. It’s infuriating.

And while I’m talking about the music, I can’t help but touch on one single other little nit-pick. Five of those six songs are not...voiced...by...the...virtual...singers. Yes, I can be rightly criticized here for intentionally missing the context behind this, but it’s just absolutely perplexing to me that they would contract literally the biggest name in the vocal synth space to compose 5 bangers, recruit 5 more producers to arrange the songs, and then not actually play the synthesizers’ versions in the film? What in the world? Don’t get me wrong – the vocals are provided by the original characters, who as far as I can gather do actually voice these songs in the in-game world, and their performances as shown in the film are enjoyable enough. But please...let this make sense somehow. Again, I’m not a native Project Sekai fan, and maybe this is exactly what I would have wanted if I was a part of that fandom, but someone who was a vocal-synth fan first, this just makes no sense to me.

Now that being said, the actual songs that the vocal synths do perform were probably the best part of the film for me. Without getting into spoiler territory, the plot of this film is basically the oldest, and in my opinion, the most poignant and storied question in this space. It’s one that people have been asking ever since Crypton Future Media finally got off the ground in the mid-00s: how do people connect to the music that their software enables? How can the producers reach their audience through Hatsune Miku as a medium – and perhaps more importantly – does Miku become something more than just an instrument or a piece of software when this occurs? It’s a thoroughly-discussed topic and for good reason, and you’ll find this at the crux of the film’s plot here – I enjoyed it and I hope you will too.

In conclusion – I enjoyed this movie, and I’d probably watch it again, if only to pick up on some of the cameos I missed the first time. But keep in mind this is a Project Sekai movie – it’s about Miku, but it’s more about the world of the game than it is about VOCALOID production. I did promise we’d return to that term, right? Yes. Hatsune Miku is not a VOCALOID – not any more. Before any of their most famous six were released, Crypton Future Media had paired with none other than Yamaha (!) to come up with the VOCALOID engine in 2004. 15 years later – the duo split, and Miku and friends are no longer VOCALOIDS. Theories range on why, but you won’t see a single overt reference to VOCALOID in this film. Why is this relevant, and why do I only circle back to this now? It’s because, in my mind, this is where the film finds its largest strength. Miku doesn’t need to be VOCALOID or have the support of the Yamaha giant to have meaning for her fans. You don’t need to be a hardcore VOCALOID fan to enjoy her music. You don’t have to be a Project Sekai fan to love her and what she represents for you. And – perhaps most importantly – you don’t need to “understand” her for her voice to reach you, through the producers that she speaks through, and I think that’s beautiful.