Children of the Sea
After a highly successful career as an anime director – with projects like Space Brothers and Ace Attorney – Ayumu Watanabe finally is making his standalone feature directorial debut with the long-anticipated Children of the Sea. Following a young girl named Ruka (Ayumu Watanabe) who meets two boys named Umi (Hiiro Ishibashi) and Sora (Seishuu Uragami), who are apparently raised in the sea, the film has its own sense of whimsicalness and curiosity yet stands out as shockingly bland and forgettable.
The undeniable highlight of the film is its animation style – which is stunning. Where the overall character animation is serviceable, whenever the film embraces a bright and bold color scheme with the underwater world, it is some of the best animation of the year. Not only does the animation design carry a unique style, but the film's interpretation of water and undersea life feels fresh and breathtaking. It is increasingly becoming easier for a film to have solid animation to where the bare standard is arguably quite impressive, but it is so much harder and rarer to see a film truly play around with its visuals and craft a unique visual language as Children of the Sea does.
With an incredible visual design and a story with seemingly natural room for an engaging plot, it seems almost automatic that Children of the Sea will contain some fun adventure, yet this is perhaps the most shocking element of the film. For the interesting setup, the film fails to do much with the vast majority of its runtime, often wandering, showcasing more style than substance. The plot it eventually finds is incredibly contrived and is seriously lacking with emotional weight and depth. The reason anime films such as Spirited Away stand out as masterpieces are not because of their interesting visuals and world concepts but because, within that creativity, it finds a legitimate emotional weight. Children of the Sea continues a depressing trend in anime films of movies getting lost in style without finding legitimate emotion with any attempt for a deeper meaning feeling overly basic and pretentious.
In order for emotional depth to work, the characters need to be captivating and their emotions need to be grounded in an experience that others can relate to. The basic angle for emotional depth that recent anime films have taken of characters having generic emotional pain is uninspiring to watch and immediately fails to truly hit any audience with a gut punch in an effort to be universal enough to where anyone could understand the emotions of the film. This idea continually has found its way into anime films, with A Whisker Away from just earlier this year being another prime example, and while Children of the Sea feels a bit more inspired than that film, it feels eerily similar in its disconnects that holds it back from being something truly must-watch.
The animation might be stunning, but the engagement of Children of the Sea is a sinking boat. Not only did the film need a better sense of urgency, but it needed a deeper more substantial voice to really become something special. As it stands, Children of the Sea is a competent yet ultimately forgettable film that will fail to inspire most audiences, even with the pretty colors.
