Ni no Kuni

Best friends Yuu, Haru, and Kotona enjoy a tranquil high school life together. One day, however, a suspicious man pursues and stabs Kotona—a catastrophe that Yuu and Haru fail to prevent. While hastily carrying the girl to the hospital, the two boys are nearly hit by a truck but miraculously remain unharmed. Instead, they find themselves in a fairy-tale-like kingdom with an exotic diversity of people and wonderful creatures.

To their surprise, the boys discover that Yuu, who has been confined to a wheelchair since childhood, can now walk! Yet they have no time to ponder the puzzling situation, as their friend is gone. Setting off to find Kotona, Yuu and Haru stop at a local pub to inquire about her. But upon inspecting a picture of Asha, the kingdom's princess, the two have a shocking revelation.

Narrating an extraordinary adventure in a magical world, Ni no Kuni demonstrates the special connection between two separate yet parallel worlds and its manifestation of the bonds between individuals.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Yuu Main

Yamazaki, Kento Japanese

Haru Main

Arata, Mackenyu Japanese

Asha Supporting

Nagano, Mei Japanese

Midorikawa, Miki Supporting

Rosch, Barton Supporting

Roam, Bertha Supporting

Sakamoto, Maaya Japanese

Kotona Supporting

Nagano, Mei Japanese

Danba Supporting

Kaji, Yuuki Japanese

Gnauss, Yoki Supporting

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Mishima, Saki Supporting

Sakamoto, Maaya Japanese

Bezerra, Wendel Producer

Katou, Hiroyuki Producer

Momose, Yoshiyuki Director

Nakata, Makoto Episode Director

Reviews

Jan 16, 2020

anime-prime

Recommended

1: You are being chased by a guy with a dagger through the streets. You call your friend but he doesn't pick up. What do you do?
A: Call the cops to come and help?
B: Call an adult to come and help?
C: Call your other friend who is in a wheelchair to come and help?
If your answer is C, then you will probably love this movie. If it isn't then you will probably enjoy watching this show to laugh at other dumb things the characters did.

2: You find your stabbed girlfriend on the streets in the arms of your best friend (not in that way, get ... your minds out of the gutter). Your girlfriend is losing blood and your friend who can't walk (because he is a cripple but is still trying to carry her and save her) is holding her too tightly. What do you do?
A: Rush over and help carry her?
B: Call an ambulance?
C: Ask your friend in an angry voice why he is holding his girlfriend like that?
If your answer is C, then you will probably love this movie. If it isn't then you will probably enjoy watching this show to laugh at other dumb things the characters did.

Ni No Kuni is as cliche and over dramatic as it gets. So much so that I called every single plot point and surprise twist reveal. Cliche doesn't necessarily mean bad, but it does lead to a lack of enjoyment when you have seen everything it does done better in other movies. Nothing is really bad but nothing is really good either besides for the art. It will entertain kids though and that is enough. This movie was made by an animator employee of Studio Ghibli, Momose Yoshiyuki, and while you can tell that by the animation and sound (by another Ghibli employee), it fails to do what most Miyazaki films do, and that is to touch your heart. That is probably because of the generic script from Akihiro Hino. The script is definitely the falling point of this movie.

Story:
Ni No Kuni is about two friends named Yusuke (Yuu) and Haru who both like a girl named kotona who suddenly gets stabbed and when they to rescue her they end up in the middle of traffic and get transported to a fantasy world. The only difference is that they got transported before they got hit by a vehicle. In this world they find that there is a princess named Astrid who looks like their Kotona and is in critical condition just like her and they need to try to figure out the connection between the two girls and the two worlds, and they need to find a way to save both of them since they are both injured.

Art:
The art and animation are the best things in the movie. It almost looks like a Ghibli or Ponoc film. The art is pretty and clean and the animation is smooth and explosive. The CGI actually looks pretty good in this movie.

Sound:
Nothing of note here. It fits in and does its job but there is nothing memorable about it. It is slightly surprising since the music composer is done by Joe Hisashi, otherwise known as the musical composer for pretty much every studio Ghibli movie. The soundtrack is good and keeps me invested in the atmosphere of each scene but it is one of his weaker works. My personal favorite songs of his are "My Neighbor Totoro" (the Totoro song) and "Carrying You" (from Castle in the Sky). I saw the movie in English on Netflix and the dub was good. The British-like voices from the other world annoyed me a bit but everyone was well cast.

Characters:
There is nothing unique about the characters. they had emotions and names and faces but besides for one being in a wheelchair (for only part of the movie), there is nothing that I could say about the characters that would distinguish them from other characters. Haru was just a badly written character for most of the movie and the other leads were just generic characters with no motivations besides for protecting those they love.

Enjoyment:
While I can't say that I didn't enjoy it, I might have enjoyed it for the wrong reasons. I laughed at some of the stupid things that the characters did throughout the movie like what I wrote in the opening paragraph. There were a lot of other times that dumb things happened. Dumb, but entertaining to watch.

Overall:
I enjoyed the movie and that is what counts the most. But overall the movie just suffers from a bad script. For what it is, from the studio behind Pokemon, studio OLM, kids will enjoy it and it is for them that it was probably made. Unlike with Ghibli movies, this movie didn't have a lesson or moral to give over, and that may actually be its biggest sin.

Score: 8 (Good and had some great elements, but I wouldn't rewatch it).
I don't think it deserves an 8 but I enjoyed it too much (for whatever reason) to give it a 7.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jan 18, 2020

Firechick12012

Mixed Feelings

What we have here is Level-5's attempt at making a movie, and on the surface, it looks promising. Ni no Kuni is a game series that got started in the early 2010s, and it was famous for one thing: It was the first video game that Studio Ghibli worked on. No, really. Level-5 actually brought Ghibli on to animate various cutscenes and had Joe Hisaishi make the music for it. Needless to say, everyone who played it really liked it. I've been wanting to play the game myself for years, but it was on the PS3, which I could never afford. It did get re-released ... on the Switch, so I wasted no time buying it, but I never got to sit down and play it yet. Getting back on track, Ni no Kuni eventually went on to get a sequel game and, as of last year, a movie with an original story. When I heard about the movie, I was really excited! But then I actually got to watch it.

Good lord, I've been disappointed before, but this was just...painful. I really want to like this movie. I really do! It does have a lot going for it at first...and it crashed and burned. Hard. So what's the story? Well, it focuses on three kids: Yu, Haru, and Kotona, who are great friends and spend a lot of time together. One day, Kotona is stabbed by a mysterious pursuer. Haru and Yu try to save her, but when they're nearly killed in a car accident...they wake up in another world called Evermore. But Kotona is missing, and the princess of this world they're in happens to look almost exactly like her. In their quest to save the princess and find Kotona, they learn more about Evermore and what it has in common with Earth, but the friends' loyalty to each other get tested and strained when their actions in Evermore have consequences in the real world. Yu may have to make hard choices, especially when Haru begins acting strangely when Kotona's situation gets more complicated.

Sorry if my summary of the story isn't that great. There's a lot that I can't mention without spoiling the entire movie in the process, so I'll try to hold back as much as I can. But man, do I really want to rant about this movie! However, I don't want to be too negative, so I'll go over the positive aspects of this movie first: The animation is quite good. The world's overall look is really breathtaking, the character designs are varied and interesting, the fight choreography is top notch, and some of the fight scenes were actually pretty clever in some ways. I also really liked Yu as a character. Not only is he NOT an overpowered bland isekai protag (And he has no harem. Thank God!), he actually has a backstory, has good chemistry with his friends, and is smart and competent. He could have benefitted from more depth and had more flaws, but I'm happy with what we got. Plus, having a main character in a wheelchair who is portrayed decently well, doesn't bemoan his disability, and isn't solely defined by his disability, is pretty cool. His friend/adopted sister Saki was pretty awesome too. She got some great moments in the movie, both in the real world and in the other world. I kinda wish we had seen more of her.

Unfortunately, those are the only good things I can say about the movie, because the rest of it really doesn't fare well. While I admit I haven't played the games much, they delve into the world the kids go into in a lot more detail than the movie could even scrape, so what little we see of it is just kind of there. The setting isn't developed well enough to make its audience feel invested in it, even with the animation making it look as beautiful as possible. And that's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of this movie's many, many problems. With how well loved the games are, and how the movie is telling its own story, you'd think the creators would be able to do them justice and create an intriguing story out of it. Unfortunately, the movie is little more than a generic fantasy isekai movie, with the main kids trying to save their girl friend and the princess who is a damsel in distress. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that you'd think they'd have come straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and the real big bad is so obvious that you can tell who it is straight away. The whole movie follows the same story beats and cliches that have plagued other stories for centuries, and doesn't really do anything new or exciting with them.

And that's not even getting into the characters. Other than Yu and Saki, every single one of them is extremely bland and one-note. Kotona's the energetic girl whose life is in danger, Astrid is the damsel in distress princess who tries to be more active, the main villain is the chessmaster manipulating everything who hams it up when exposed, but all of them pale in comparison to Haru. Seriously, watching him made me feel like the writers really didn't know what to do with him most of the time. He starts out as the cheerful friend archetype, then gets needlessly angry at Yu for little to no reason (Case in point: Early in the movie, when he sees Yu with an injured Kotona, he doesn't ask if he's alright or offer to take them both to the hospital, you know, like a good friend would. He yells at him for holding her in an intimate way, takes Kotona away so he can run her to the hospital, and JUST LEAVES HIM THERE! Knowing that Yu's in a wheelchair and can't move! Dude, what a dick!), his motivations are laughable and poorly developed, and he's constantly being a reckless idiot who can't stop to think (Which Yu actually calls him out on in the movie!). Any development he gets is really unnatural and rushed, like the writers couldn't agree on what to do with him. Honestly, as a character, Haru is the biggest dark spot on the movie, and the other characters, while slightly more tolerable, are still too bland to really connect with on an emotional level, since the movie's only under two hours long. There's a lot of characters to keep track of, and I think the movie would have fared better if it had cut a few of them out to give the writers more wiggle room to strut their stuff.

Speaking of writing, I'm not even done with that portion yet. Late in the movie, a lot of stuff happens, but most of it is characters spouting about random plot points that were never mentioned before, are barely explored when they're introduced, and they just appear without rhyme or reason. Like, at one point, Astrid mentions that the only way to defeat a villain is some magic sword, but her father tells her it's been gone for years, and later, we see the sword again because some old guy gave it to Yu, who can activate it even though he has no reason to be able to do so at that point, and all is suddenly happy happy joy joy. Can you see how badly planned and written this sounds? Basically, the only reason the sword is even used again is because the plot demands it. Furthermore, there are a ton of other plot threads that get little to no deep exploration, such as an old man who Yu met when he was a kid. We never know his name, we never know who he is or why he's there, but when the story writes itself in a corner, he appears and gives the heroes the tools they need to save the day, and then leaves again. He's basically a Deus Ex Machina in human form, and that's not good writing. Seriously.

I don't have much to say about the soundtrack, as its Joe Hisaishi, and from what I've heard, he re-uses tracks from some of the games. Again, I haven't played them, so I can't judge them on how well they fit into the movie, but I kinda feel like Hisaishi overused his orchestra to the point where the BGMs were so loud during certain scenes that they just got obnoxious. And at other points, the music swells and gets dramatic, then suddenly just stop. Oh, and the CGI made no effort to actually integrate with the animation. My God, close-ups of various monsters walking through rugged terrain don't even try to blend in with the 2D animation, making them stick out like a sore thumb, even worse than how Granblue Fantasy did it. It's jarring and takes you out of the movie. Think looking through a closet of all black clothes and a random pink dress suddenly flies in front of your face and blinds you. That's how bad it is. It's especially obvious when important characters, who are traditionally animated, are the focus of a scene, while obviously CGI soldiers flail around in the background, their limb movements all herky jerky and the texture so computerized that you can tell they're not even trying to make them mix with the scenery.

So yeah, the movie's not great. It's poorly written, the characters are bland, the story is cliche in all the worst ways, the CG is terrible and makes no effort to try to be less jarring than it is, and any drama it tries to pull off comes off forced and artificial. But in all honesty, if Ni no Kuni had been just a generic isekai movie, I wouldn't have minded. It would have been just a generic but still serviceable movie...but then the ending happened. I won't spoil it for you, but the ending is absolutely one of the most awful, badly written endings I've ever seen in any form of media, not only by just how out of nowhere the final twist is, but how little sense it makes, and how it completely spits on everything the movie previously established all for the sake of forced drama that didn't need to happen. Seriously, I haven't been this infuriated at anything since the Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card anime's just as God-awful ending, and this one stoops to a whole new level of bad writing. I mean, you really have to TRY to be that bad.

I really don't want to hate this movie. I really don't. If the writers had made more of an effort with it and smoothed out all of its issues, it could have been a fine movie capable of standing on its own merits. Alas, what we wound up getting was a complete mess with a God awful ending that ruined an already flimsy premise to Hell and back. So don't waste your time with this one.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Jan 17, 2020

caleb3817

Not Recommended

Am I the only one who strongly disliked this movie. The 2d animation was good but the CGI was downright awful. Models looked worse than videogames from two generations ago. It's hard to get into specific details without giving away spoilers but the world history and logic created in the games are completely shattered in this movie. The timeline is all mixed up. The story is often predictable. I think as a stand-alone movie it would be ok for someone who hasn't played the games but as someone whos put 30+ hours into Ni No Kuni 1 and 2 each this movie feels like an ... insult that hurts my perspective on the series as a whole.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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