I've Always Liked You

Story: If you've read a lot of romance manga you probably won't consider the story as very original. The entire movie is about different characters trying to build up the courage to confess their love. However, I do not believe that there are many animated stories of this kind which makes it unique in it's own sense. Sure, it doesn't have any super original plot point or anything that makes it very unique, but the story is well executed for what it is and if you're into more pure love stories, I believe you'll like the story in this one. Art: I rarely care about the artin anime to be honest. The art is good and of normal 2016-standard. Sound: Some fantastic songs that set the mood very well. Really was a big part of the movie for me. Characters: The characters themselves are nothing out of the ordinary, but what is special is the relationships between the character. Natsuki and Yuu are your typical childhood friend love cliche, Akarin and Mochizuki have never really talked with eachother properly, and Haruki and Miou are pretty much dating, but they haven't realized it yet. It was interesting to see all these different types of relationships in one movie. Enjoyment: Through most of the movie I was screaming at the characters to just get together already, but I must say that I really found the story and characters refreshing in a time where ecchi, magical girls and tragedy rules the romance anime industry. Overall: I feel like a lot of loose ends will meet in the sequel which will be released in december, but until then I'll give this movie an 8 overall score. It's really worthwhile if you like pure high-school romance animes, and especially if you like series like Ao Haru Ride. Don't expect someting AMAZING and I'll think you'll enjoy this movie.

I'm always a sucker for a sweet, innocent, slice of life romance; and this, my friends, really hit the spot. There are many many slice of life romance anime out there, but not all of them tend to go very well in my opinion. A lot of the time i end up very frustrated while watching because of misunderstandings or lack of chemistry or something along those lines. That wasn't the case for this movie though. The characters were all extremely likable, there actually wasn't a single character i was annoyed by (which rarely happens). The art was lovely, which is something i'm very picky with. And the music wasreally enjoyable! I tend not to like/care about the music in anime, if a song catches my attention its pretty rare, but i really loved the music in this to the point where i actually searched it up on youtube afterwards. Anyways, if you are looking for a sweet, fluffy, carefree anime to watch and squeal to then I definitely recommend this one. xx

I gotta admit, I'm a sucker for a good romance. I like it in basically every shape or form: I like it with a sad ending, a happy ending, with comedic ambiance, with serious atmosphere and one of my favourite types is the cute, heart-warming one. But this one? This one I hated. I can't even describe how excruciating it was to watch. The plot was completely decentralized, unnecerarily jumping from one character to another. I guess the writers wanted to include as many stories from the music videos as possible but because of the limited time they had for this movie, it ended up being abouteverything and nothing at the same time. The formula that worked in case of the music videos, where we knew close to nothing about characters but still rooted for them, certainly shouldn't have been applied here. The personalities of the characters are just your cookie-cutter shoujo archetypes or at least they seem so because, as I mentioned before, we know close to NOTHING about the characters. We don't really know much about their relationships beside who-has-a-crush-on-whom, we never learn why these characters are in love with each other, we don't really know their history, we are just randomly presented with certain informations about them like "this girl likes this band", "this boy likes video games", "just person likes this person... just because". This one hour is filled mostly with some mundane, irrelevant to the plot and random scenes that don't even add much to the characters, they just happen because "everyone eats food, people eat food and have a small talk, let's have a scene with 3 characters stuffing themeselves and talking about nothing!" or that scene that got me scratching my head the most with the question "why does it have to exist?" which is... a shot of each character sitting in their bathtubs at the same and just thinking about how much their suck when it comes to love. Dear Lord, cease my suffering. I wasn't expecting some kind of super deep-psychological character development or complicated plot or anything. I wanted to see a simple, cute high-school romance and let go of my worries for today. But this is so badly written storyboard-wise, and since I write stories myself, I just can't help but get irritated by how you can delete the majority of the movie and it would change almost nothing about the plot. The story is just a one big mess. Instead of introducing us to a close to 10 characters, the writers should've focused on the main 3 the movie is supposed be about: Natsuki, Ayase and Yuu and just go with their story. This way there would be more time to invest in showing us the relationship between Natsuki and the boys and we would know why are we supposed to root for them. Because I don't root for them. I don't fricking care who she end up with at the end because I know close to nothing about this characters, their history and their personalities. Let us see why Natsuki and Yuu are such good friends, let us see how they interact with each other. Show us how Natsuki and Ayase met and why he fell in love with her. Fricking show us his make-over he supposedly did just for her! We are only presented with this fact in the fricking moment he shows up on the screen for the first time! Like "This is Ayase, btw he looked like this in the past but this was before the movie". This way we would have mor cohesive and engaging story. There's this other movie about Yuu's little sis Hina, which btw I watched before this flick because I didn't know they were related. They did what I just said and it turned out sooooo much better. I mean, it wasn't great but I can at least say I kinda enjoyed it. We saw how Hina met the guy, how she started falling in love with him, why she fell in love with him, what she felt back then etc. etc. It revolved mostly about her story, hinting from time to time that there are other characters with their own crushes ("check our music videos for more, *win wink*") but it never to deviate from the main plotline which was good. Heck, I only know anything about Ayase thanks to that anime! And that's why I think this story is terrible and you shouldn't waste your time on it, go watch the music videos, good night.