Pretty much my ideal anime romance plotline in terms of structure, pacing and execution. Really really highly rate this one.

They have a really good grip on pacing in every scale. In the moment, they're never rushing. They wait just that little bit longer to reveal something. They hold a pose a little longer than you might expect. Despite how short the overall thing is, since they only have 1 movie's runtime worth to work with, they're never tripping over themselves to get you information, which just has a very mature aura. There are some fundamental things that they just don't get very much time to develop because of the runtime, but it also means they don't have time to dawdle or get sidetracked. In many ways, the pacing really reflects the narrative itself. Even the narrative is framed like a recollection of memories, skipping by the less important stuff, and spending time the significant things happened.

And then in a grander sense, they're not rushing to get started, nor are they rushing to finish. That also means that the start is a bit slow, but it isn't flat out uninteresting, and it sets the stage for everything else to slowly build up. And I really appreciate that they don't cut off the moment they think they can get away with it, but instead let everything play out, and even throw in a hint of where they end up in the future. In media, I'm at the end because I wanted to know what happened, so it is almost always great to show me what happens after when it's new.

None of the characters really behaved in unbelievable ways at any point. It's not like every single character was the most interesting in the world- initially I wasn't really a big fan of MC, and thought he was dragging it down a bit- but they serve their purpose for the sake of the story, and the MC develops quite a bit by the end.

I was a big fan of the way they played around with reveals throughout the story. There were a lot of moments where they didn't quite do things the way I would've expected, or went down a road I wasn't expecting, and it was never unjustified. Sometimes it got close to being a little too blunt in terms of foreshadowing, but I think it's better to go down interesting roads and foreshadow more bluntly than it is to spent too much time trying to be subtle and take a mostly conventional path. The way this narrative frames it, giving us information about the future that allows the audience to know things the characters don't, and even vice versa- having moments where the characters see/hear something and not showing the audience- really worked here.

There's an art to making a moment that will make me cry, and I definitely thought at first that they had hardened me with the way they had set things up, but then it hits, and you start crying in the club. Idk the science, I wish I did. I can speculate that it has something to do with contrast, about seeing characters behave in a way that is out of character, or maybe it's as simple as saying the right things at the right time with the right music. Either way, though smiling, I was still a bit of a mess at one point, and I felt they earned it.

I wasn't paying super close attention to it, but the music all around was pretty good too. There were moments where a lot of wacky progressions were being thrown in, stuff that felt a little more ambiguous and unconventional, just had a really interesting emotion about them. It feels less like I'm being pandered to when they aren't so direct with the sounds they make, especially in emotional climaxes.

It was really great. I'm usually scared to go for movies because most of the time the writers just don't know how to budget their limited time and deliver an unsatisfying story, but if there are more like these, I wanna see them.