Looking back at my “Movie/OVA” tag, it’s striking just how rare it is that I’m covering anything that isn’t attached to an existing anime.  OVAs especially are almost dead when it comes to the “Original” part (the last one I covered that wasn’t part of a franchise was Dragon Dentist).  There are certainly the occasional theatrical movies that aren’t extensions of TV anime, but I rarely seem to have time to cover them.  Penguin Highway was the last one – I guess if you’re going to do it so rarely, may as well make it a great one.

Well, this is blogging in the time of COVID-19.  There are a few movies out on disc now that I’m going to try and get to during this downtime.  A couple are originals, and Hello World is one of them.  Is it Penguin Highway?  No – but it’s rather good.  Itou Tomohiko is quite a competent director, and with this project at Graphinica he’s working with CGI exclusively (well, almost exclusively – I’ll get to that).  The writer is Nozaki Mado who, if anything, has proved himself with Babylon and Sekaisuru Kado to be much better at coming up with interesting concepts than at executing them.

Does that carry over to Hello World?  Yes, to an extent.  There are a lot of interesting ideas in this movie, but it does end up being kind of a mess.  And its ending is one that’s left very much open to interpretation.  Needless to say, if you haven’t seen it and would rather avoid spoilers please stop reading now, because I’m going to talk about that ending.  Mind you my interpretation of it might be totally wrong, but it’s still an interpretation that will spoil the meat of it.

For starters, this is the story of a likeable but painfully introverted 16 year-old Kyoto bookworm named Katagaki Naomi (an equally likeable Kitamura Takumi).  One day a crow steals one of his library books (Jean Auel’s The Shelters of Stone, which I read at just a few years older) and leads him on a wild good chase to Fushimi Inari.  There he meets a hooded man who appears literally out of thin air.  This man eventually claims to be Naomi from 10 years in the future (Matsuzaka Tori – fittingly) – the original setting is 2027, by the way.  Why is he here?  To help his younger self get a girlfriend, he says.

If that motivation seems a little thin, there’s a reason for it – Katagaki-san has an ulterior motive beyond helping Katagaki-kun, and a girl named Ichigyou Ruri (Hamabe Minami) is at the heart of it.  The big twist here is the strongest part of the script – the way it’s resolved in the third act is a little more problematic.  And this is where interpretation comes into the picture.  As I read things, neither Naomi-kun’s world or Katagaki-san’s “real” world were real.  Indeed, much of what happens with the “ALLTALE” system makes no sense otherwise.  The real world appears to be what happens in the epilogue, on the moon – which would explain why it was the only scene done in 2D animation.

Now, even if this is true, that doesn’t by any means explain everything.  What I take from it is that it was Naomi who was struck by lightning in the first place, not Ichigyou, and the entire “ALLTALE” world simulation was created in order to give him a “past” to wake up with on the moon.  But where does the moon come into it to begin with?  If Naomi-san was struck by lightning in Kyoto why is he in a coma on the moon?  And what about Naomi-kun?  I can only guess that he and Ichigyou-chan are virtual, but perceive themselves to be real – and their ending sees them living on as 16 year-olds growing up in the simulation Naomi-san created in his simulation (and was thus. by extension, created by Ichigyou-san and her colleagues on the moon).

Like I said, all of that could be completely off-base, but Mado is not a writer who’s adept at tying things together.  It works well enough as a story – and Hello World as a film.  While the character animation isn’t perfect, by CGI standards it’s among the best I’ve seen in anime (and makes sense dramatically).  And the backgrounds are quite lovely – Kyoto is depicted in a rather sumptuous hybrid of realistic and fantastical.  This is theatrical anime in the post-Kimi no Na wa. universe – it’s clear what Hello World is shooting for, and while it’s certainly not in the Shinkai class it manages to be solidly engaging.