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"As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion", says King Solomon in Proverbs.

Kotonoha no Niwa is a fair woman with outlandish graphix, magical background, stunning rain effects, crazy shading and reflections... but no discretion nor taste.

It's like C-64 demoscene, designed to flex technical skill. That's it. Or so you'd hope, because the show has one of the most appalling plots, unlikable characters, & stale dialouges in the history of anime, maybe ever.

The "story" revolves around a high-school student who likes making shoes and wants to become a shoemaker. He often skips morning classes to watch ... the rain. So far so good.

Then he meets an older lady, who skips work to drink booze. Slowly but surely they develop creepy feelings toward each other ("mind the gap!") only to be ended at a very anti-climactic climatic climax. That's it. I'd rather have them not talk nor meet and just stare at the beautiful animation for 40 minutes than having to suffer the trash plot.

The dialogue is dry, the characters are cynical lacking any redeeming qualities. I don't feel bad for them, tbh it's hard to feel anything at all other than contempt & disgust.

Overall 1/10, you can watch it for the art but be sure to mute because the story is a complete disaster.

This is going to have spoilers although tbh there isn't a lot to spoil. So prepare yourself to be underwhelmed!

The hero younger sister of all weebs, aka Kaede-chan, is struggling with grades and remenants of her extreme social anxiety from previous installments of Rascal, and is now facing the dilemma of going to the same school as her brother - because she wants to become a normal girl like everyone else, and remain closer to her brother. Which is an interesting integration of old-Kaede and new-Kaede. Of course that requires high grades which she doesn't have at the moment and overcoming her personal fears.

The other ... option is to apply to a more liberal, "work from home" school aka correspondence school aka COVID-19 Zoom classroom. With time she learns more about that option and realises she doesn't have to become *normal* normal and that it may be better for her to choose a school more suited to her needs. As for getting more friends, apparently that's not much of a problem since people there seem to socialise pretty OK within a safer, less pressuring environment.

As you can tell this is basically an extremely long & elaborate advertisement for "correspondence schools", extolling the benefits and providing rational arguments for why it's a better option. It's becomes very obvious and almost aggressive marketing by the end. Btw private schools cost A LOT.

Moral of the story: it's OK to give up your dreams and an engaging & lively high-school life in favour of a Microsoft Teams school as long as you have the money to afford it.

So:

Art - 9/10 - wonderful character design & animation, using gentle colours and a specific style that sets it apart from other animes.

Characters - 4/10 - Rascal's characters are lovely but this time they feel like lifeless copies of the previous installments

Plot - 1/10 - nothing happens, it's probably the slowest anime film I've ever seen (and I expect films to be packed with a lot of content, it's not like 24ep SoL where you can drag & drag), not really engaging, nothing particularly interesting or mysterious happens even though that's mostly what defines the Rascal franchise

VA - 10/10 - gotta love the VAs

Soundtrack - ?/10 - I haven't noticed it had one

Tl;dr: if you're haven't watched the entire franchise there's isn't much too see here unless it's part of some Zen patience training because this is going to get you bored real fast. For those who love Rascal's characters and want to see more of them, well, there you have it, but they don't do anything particularly interesting. Extremely underwhelming considering that the original anime & films had some of the most emotionally engaing plots in anime history.