Summer Anime Midnight Matinee! “X”
Welcome to the first in my series of anime movie reviews called Summer Anime Midnight Matinee! This time I’ll be watching the movie “X”. I have no idea what this movie is about, but I vaguely remember my older brother liking it when he was in middle school. So maybe I’ll like it too? I pretty much just picked it because it was on CrunchyRoll and easy to access. If I remember correctly, this movie is written by Clamp and I liked Card Captor Sakura and some other anime and manga by them, so even if I don’t like the story too much, I’m bound to at least like the animation and character design. So, going in totally blind, let’s watch “X”!
First Impressions!
Wow, it’s really a beautiful anime. This movie was first released in 1996 and for that era the animation is amazingly good quality. A lot of the character designs have a very Vampire Hunter D: Blood Lust look to them. And I can definitely tell this is a Clamp movie, there’s flower petals fluttering through the air everywhere. The movie literally starts with just flower petals floating around in a black background. Clamp loves flower petals! The movie also looks really artistic. There’s a lot of dream sequences, hallucinations, and visions, so the story is presented in a very abstract, artistic way. I definitely like that.
The Story
Wow, this is bleak. Like darker than Ergo Proxy style of bleak. The story is about a teen boy that’s supposed to stop the end of the world, but he’s just not that into it.
The story is also really cyclical. The main character Kamui is told by his mother that she’s going to have to die, so he can become strong. Once he’s strong enough he needs to return to Tokyo so he can save his friends. So she dies, he becomes a strong magic user and returns to his home town. But because he returns, it begins the events that bring about the end of the world, endangering his friends.
Stick with me now. The heavenly dragons ask him to stop the end of the world, but he says no, he just wants to save his friends. His friends that are endangered because of the end of the world. The end of the world that him returning to Tokyo started. Yeah.
Then one of his friends (Fuma) is shown a vision from the bad guy earth dragons that shows his little sister being killed by Kamui. This isn’t actually a lie because technically speaking Kamui’s return started the chain of events that endangered them. So to protect his little sister, Fuma kills her by ripping a sword out of her. He needs the sword to kill Kamui, so Kamui can’t kill Fuma’s little sister. Got that?
Even the head bad guy lady has a strange circular way of thinking. Supposedly she started the end of the world with the earth dragons to free her sister (the head of the heavenly dragons) from her responsibilities of seeing the future for politicians. So her solution was to destroy the world. Ummm, if the world and all the people are destroyed, wouldn’t her sister be dead too?
So in the end, the earth dragons kill all of the heavenly dragons, then Fuma kills the earth dragons, then Kamui kills Fuma for killing his own little sister, which Kamui is kind of also responsible for endangering. Oh, and while this battle between the earth dragons and heavenly dragons is going on, all of Tokyo is destroyed too.
If Kamui’s mom had just kept her mouth shut about her vision in the beginning, did nothing and Kamui had just stayed in the countryside and like called his friends instead, the world would have never ended, everyone would have stayed alive and it would have just been a cute Slice-of-life anime about friends in the city and the countryside.
In conclusion!
Did I like this movie? Ummm, yes and no. Much like the story, it’s complicated. I loved the look of the movie, the animation for its era was gorgeous. I also liked how the story was presented through a wide variety of dream scapes and visions. I liked the variety of characters that were easily identifiable from each other. There’s lots of things to like about this movie. It’s just the whole, no win, no happy ending possible type of story isn’t really my cup of tea. I kind of got frustrated by watching people make bad decisions that made no rational sense. There was a whole lot of “hurting with the intent to help” going on.
#anime #animeMovie #Japan #JapaneseCulture #movieReview #paranormalAnime
