That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: The Movie - Scarlet Bond

Somehow slow and rushed at the same time. The first half hour tries to establish the new characters, but their motivations are one-dimensional and predictable. There's so much exposition that Rimiru even jokes about there being an info dump on top of another info dump. The villain is super hammy and never conveys much of a threat. His motivations are also contrived and not very clear. Once the action starts it's pretty decent. There's a chase scene that looks very good on the big screen and one fight with Diablos that looks good, but most of the fighting ispretty predictable. The good guys annihilate the bad guys. The conclusion is unsatisfying with multiple unnecessary asspulls for us to arrive at the "happy ending."

tl;dr: A pretty generic filler film that’s decent enough. This is a filler film that takes place after the second season of Tensura. As is generally the case with filler films, most everything it introduces will never be seen again after this film. Surprisingly, there was a pretty major exception to that in that this film is the anime debut of Violet, a character that’s pretty important. And I guess this film also somewhat fleshed out Diablo in ways that hadn’t been gone into in the anime yet. However, at the end of the day, the writing has to be careful not to do anything thatwill have any impact on the overarching story so it’s not like it did all that much with them. Tensura is at it’s best when it’s combining lots of intricate plot lines and world building so not being able to actually do anything impactful long term is especially hindering as compared to filler films for other anime like battle shounen. Still, I suppose the plot was pretty good within the scope of what it could do. It was pretty simple, straightforward, and somewhat generic, but it was reasonably enjoyable. It didn’t really do much with any of the main cast other than reinforce some character beats a bit, but it did a pretty good job with the two new characters Hiiro and Towa. They don’t really get character arcs either, but how self-sacrificing they are is enough to hold up their character for the span of a film and build up enough investment in them to give the emotional beats in the finale some weight. Though I feel it would have been better to make their relationship more clearly romantic to add a bit more spice to things. The art and animation for the most part were a bit better than the main series, but not dramatically so. The exception to that was the action which was noticeably much better. None of the new character’s designs really stood out that much, and I feel it was a waste not giving everyone new outfits like filler films often do. The soundtrack was decent enough but not particularly memorable. The ED was the standard film white scrolling text on a black background, but the song was pretty good.

Scarlet Bond is a moderately entertaining movie with flashy animation and a subpar plot. It's just mindless fun - there's nothing egregiously bad about it, but your time would probably be better spent doing something else. My main issue is how bland the plot is. The big conflict could have been easily solved if some of the characters were to use their brain or common sense for even five seconds, but for the sake of artificially raising the stakes, they have to follow along with the villain's stupid plans. The new (good) characters are okay - they were occasionally entertaining, and I do like their backstories -though they aren't very memorable or nuanced otherwise. The villain is just annoying. Without spoiling details, the end of the story also has these two "gotchas" that kind of make you feel cheated of a more emotionally impactful ending - you'll know what I mean. So, don't go into this movie expecting a revolutionary story. You can still expect to see some cool fight animations, and of course, Rimuru and the whole gang being badass for brief yet cathartic moments. But that's about it.