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Firstly, the movie looks absolutely gorgeous with incredible background art and animation creating some haunting and memorable imagery, it's very calming and relaxing to look at in the first part of the movie in particular to the extent I started dropping off to sleep. Second, more fantastic part of the movie was a series of set pieces which while impressive to look at there is something that just felt "off".

Characters were not engaging, main character just seemed to have 2 looks - stoic angry and stoic determined, the Heron was not much of a character at all, and many of the rest felt kinda ... like bland and forgettable plot devices shoehorned-in, with the exception of Natsuko where there seemed to be a more interesting backstory than the main characters.

Result is the experience was just kinda cold and detached: it consistently looks great, and while I did not find it overly confusing and am quite OK with slower paced and/or more abstract movies, this was just a very hard movie to engage with.

It's an enjoyable popcorn-flick, enjoyed it a lot more than more than the visually gorgeous but muddled Weathering With You, although less than Your Name - or any of Shinkai's previous works.

While the backgrounds are as gorgeous as always, the Character acting/animation is noticeably more generic than Your Name, and character design and writing are similarly generic - Suzume's design and overall character reminds me a lot of the protagonist from Roujin Z (a positive!), Souta a dark-haired Howl (this is played with well in the early section of the film, less so later on), although rest of characters are cut+paste from any generic anime, ... and the overt Ghibli references are kinda distracting. Shinkai does not need them, and the story - although maybe less so the commercial appeal - would likely be better without them.

Plot is fine, but again very much in a popcorn-flick context, thinking about it too much would likely prove frustrating and feels very much by-the-numbers to delivery on audience expectations of a Shinkai film. Pacing is uneven, movie feels 20 to 30 minutes too long, maybe more production constraints - or screenwriting help - would help deliver a more tightly plotted and paced movie. Soundtrack wasn't bad, just seemed out of place at and heavy-handed at times, surprising as usually a Shinkai strongpoint.

Positives are that it is engaging, it was an easily enjoyable watch, the road-trip format and the characters they meet along the way is interesting - and some of those being fleeting encounters is kinda what it's like, and well captured - but overall it just didn't have that 'X-factor' that takes it from 'good' to 'great'.

although I had my doubts about the reintroduction of Gilbert - it having been given away in the movie's promotional material - I'd say this was done in the best way it could have been and provides closure to the story which it probably did need vs an overly ambiguous ending along with Daisy's journey for an 'after story' vs time-skip montages.

Legacy as well as Progress and Change appear to be themes of the movie, with Clara's letters to Ann having a cross-generational benefit to both Daisy and her parents, Yuris's thumbs-up gesture being adopted on the island, the postoffice museum examples of the former ... and completion of the radio tower and introduction of the telephone examples of the latter.

Sound design good as always, although as with the series, the music - while awesome in it's own right - was a little overbearing at times

Would have given it a 9 if it had ended with 20 minutes to go though, not a fan of the ending.

Watched it because it was so highly rated, but it was really hard to watch all the way through.

Looks fantastic, sounds fantastic, but let down by extremely poor pacing and badly timed comedy. After a strong first few episodes, the series started to drag and it was a real slog to get through the middle section of episodes to the very well staged but rather predictable conclusion.

Art style and animation are, for the most part, all extremely good as is unsurprisingly the music. That's the good.

The bad: Direction from episode to episode seems disjointed, pacing all over the place and just did not seem to ... actually go anywhere other than stage one 'emotional' moment and then meander along to another, comedy was off-putting and often occurred at key emotional points in the story.

Good editing could have resolved many of these problems, tightening up the pacing and removing some of the worst offending 'comedy' - or at least have the comedy in a more defined section of each episode.

Wonderful little series, very sweet and full of charm and likeable characters, No-one is mean, everyone has their strengths and flaws and pulling off a romantic drama with two introverted leads is some achievement.

Art style is distinctive and very easy on the eye, even if the animation itself is somewhat uneven in quality throughout the series, and when the CGI extras appear at certain points in the story then they are really jarring to look at.

Sound design and sparing use of music are terrific throughout, as is extremely strong storyboarding and shot composition, although a reliance on framing and nonverbal cues lead to missing key ... detail and character dynamics. This is one show that gets better on rewatch, as it's a more nuanced story than it initially appears.

For a series that largely avoids drama, a surprising amount of narrative tension is built at key points, and although a lot of the usual tropes common with this type of show are present they are very well handled or even cleverly subverted in ways that make sense within the overall narrative.

There are some powerful visuals and moments throughout, but there is a noticeable dropoff after the first few episodes, and it quickly becomes a narrative and tonal mess in the middle section in particular before recovering somewhat in the last couple of episodes.

This is only partially explained by the show's assumed knowledge of the events depicted, which in any case could be covered by an hour or two of familiarization, as the narrative becomes bogged down by repeated exposition that goes nowhere and seemingly irrelevant side plots along with poor characterization work with little in the way of nuance or narrative tension developed.

What is great ... is the Biwa playing, this is the absolute highlight of the show, as is the visual presentation, although some of the montage sequences were a noticeable drop in standards even here.

It's a very ambitious effort, but the combination of writer/director/studio seemed out of their depth in handling a story of this nature - even if not an adaptation per se - and production issues no doubt played a part.

Very much YMMV in this one I'd say, suggestion would be to start and watch the first few scenes which are some of the strongest in the series - if they do not hook you, the rest of the series won't, and if they do and you can sink into the atmosphere and mood - and the meandering and outright silly at times plot - then it could be an interesting watch.