Anime Review: Brave Story

Managed to grab tickets for Brave Story at Cathay AMK Hub last night :)

The cinema theatre was decent. We got "couple" seats... except that the person initially issued me one seat from one couple seat, and another seat from another couple seat!! :( The leg space was ample, and the theatre was only 1/3 filled with no annoying crying babies. Screen is a bit small and the sound system is so-so... wait, I'm not reviewing the cinema theatre here... oops.



Brave Story is a 2hr fantasy anime based off the same titled manga. Obviously you can expect a very long adventure story shrunk down to just 2hr so a great deal of details were excluded. It was however sufficient to cover the gist of the story, which features a young boy Wataru from the real world, having encountered a family crisis, went into an alternate fantasy world called Vision in attempt to wish for his family crisis to disappear. The story revolves around Wataru exploring the different places in vision, making friends, getting popular and eventually making tough choices like deciding between personal wishes, helping friend in astray, and sacrificing for the greater good.

As expected of typical fantasy targetted at the young, most of the characters in the story are friendly looking animal humanoids like cat-girls and lizardmen, and not so friendly looking creatures like giant toads and fire-breathing dragons and black flying monsters with sharp teeth. There are also typical character classes (heros, magicians, priests, highlanders (barbarians) and what-nots) and magic (monster summoning, colorful spells of different elements, transformable weapons) and treasure hunting (collecting 5 different gems before a wish can be granted).

The ending was also expected, you know, the hero making a politically correct decision that impacts the world, and overall it was a reasonably happy ending.
S might have more to talk about this but she doesn't want to blog this review, so, well, no further comments.

As mentioned, a great deal of story details were excluded by shrinking a manga series into just a 2hr movie. So there was this karaoke part where a song is played and a majority of Wataru's adventure just flashes past with bits and pieces of information. I felt it would be better if the manga was converted to an anime series of 13 episodes rather than just a 2hr movie, to give the whole story more credit.

Having read manga and watched anime of similar genre/storyline like Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken and Dragon Quest: Emblem of Roto, I find Brave Story to be a little less exciting than what I'd like it to be. It is decent enough to entice the younger and new people to this genre of manga/anime, but it is not fantastic enough for me. I had watched the trailer months ago and waited in anticipation, and I was almost tempted to purchase the manga series before I watched the movie, but I decide not to after the show.

I give the movie a 7 of 10, mainly for a good attempt to introduce this genre of anime/manga to this little island. Hopefully there will be more good anime movies introduced here.