I went to a screening of the film at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles that featured a Q&A with the director of the film, Ayumu Watanabe, and Kenichiro Akimoto, the CGI lead of the production.

You can tell the amount of technical effort that went into the production of this film. Daisuke Igarashi's lush art is translated decently into animated form. The CGI and hand-drawn animation are integrated extremely well. The sound design helped me smell the ocean. Kenichiro Akimoto mentioned that a goal he was given was to make it hard to tell between what was hand-drawn and what was CGI, and he completely succeeded on that front. It would definitely be harder to play "find the obviously CGI object" in this film.

I was expecting a swelling and memorable soundtrack because of the involvement of Joe Hisaishi, so I was disappointed to find the score to be more rote and bland. I actually do not remember a single major theme from the soundtrack. Ayumu Watanabe mentioned that he wanted to work with Joe Hisaishi because of Hisaishi's penchant for minimalism, and I agree that a bombastic and extremely melodic soundtrack would not have paired well with the film, but given the memorable themes that Hisaishi has produced in the past, I felt that some of the imagery of the ocean and the universe in the film was screaming to be complemented by grander, more identifiable musical motifs.

Ultimately, I felt a little disappointed when comparing this film to the source material. There were some odd adaptation choices. Professor Anglade was given a technobabble info-dump at the end of the film which really ground the film's pacing up until the climax to a halt. We don't need a verbal explanation for an acid trip! Not enough of the manga's content was axed to allow things to fit more comfortable into the run-time, resulting in what I felt were quite a few disjointed scenes and odd cuts.

Industry and economic circumstances don't really facilitate OVA's these days, but I can't help but feel the manga could have been better adapted over 6 - 8 longer OVA episodes. Especially with the inclusion of the technobabble and half-baked plot threads in this film, there just was not enough time for the characters to coagulate and consolidate into interesting persons. The manga did struggle with too much plot and exposition going on in the last couple of volumes (manga spans a total of five volumes), but there was more time for Ruka, Umi, Sora, Jim, and Ruka's parents to feel more alive.

My heart is telling me to rate the film lower because I didn't actually enjoy the film all that much to be frank, but the director seemed so earnest at the Q&A that I wanted to give some more points for the effort. It also feels criminal to give the film a score under 70, especially because the animation was that spectacular.