LogFAQs > #941425662

10. Penguin Highway

Karo: 8
Inviso: 8
Jona: 9
Red: 12
Charon: 18
Genny: 21
Johnbobb: 24

Total: 100

Karo: What It Is:
A series of bizarre penguin-related incidents plague a small town, and a group of children join together to find out the truth.

What I Think:
There is a sense of childlike wonder infusing the whole movie, sort of like playing in the woods behind your house as a kid and pretending you discovered a portal to the penguin dimension or something.
They mystery of the penguin infestation is the driving force behind the film, and it always keeps things interesting. It is a little bit goofy and a whole lot of fun, and I expect great things to come from the studio behind this movie.

Score: 83/100

Inviso: This is a long movie, and it takes a while to hit its stridebut once that happens, it really gets going and becomes interesting. Basically, this movie feels, at its heart, like an eighties adventure movie. You have the brainy leader kid, his dorky best buddy, the tomboy girl who hangs around with them, stereotypical bullies, and then a weird mystery that they have to overcome. This small town is suddenly overrun by penguins, and the kids are trying to figure this out, realizing that the main characters adult crush has penguin summoning powers, and theres a weird, floating water orb that threatens to overtake the entire town. The movie just has a good pace when it comes to unveiling new information and slowly unwrapping the sci-fi mystery at the movies core. By the time you reach the final act, everything has gone crazy, but it feels like the movie has properly ramped up to reach that conclusion. Its just a really weird and fun movie and I enjoyed laughing along with it the whole way through.

Jona: Aoyama feels unique for a main character for an anime film. He has impressive intelligence and can be pretty cocky. Its interesting to see his approaches to solving the mysteries of the random penguins, the dentist lady and the giant floating sphere. The different mysteries and the interesting two main characters really helped in making this movie engaging. His relationship with the dentist lady is pretty cute despite the age difference. The ending is really strong and emotional. This movie is just full of charm.

Red: A girl saves the world by turning every object into a penguin-holding pokeball. Really, the movie tries to act like it was some mystery to be solved. Lets be clear here, despite the characters pretending any of that made a lick of sense was a complete lie. Yes, I get it, throw penguins pop sphere. But none of whatever they tried to pass off as a logical conclusion was a logical conclusion at all. The world had a hole in it, which I assume was an idea inspired by all our dumb flat earth conspiracies or something. It was kind of fun watching the kids go through their research, though ultimately the conclusion was not nearly as interesting as the journey.

Charon: I kept waiting for this movie to start making sense and I guess that was a mistake. I like the characters in general here; they're engaging and comical. Watching this extremely intelligent boy go from eloquently speaking in a precise manner to follow it up with "think about boobs if you need to calm down" is pretty funny. Despite the nature of the plot, it's still quite well told and does follow what I consider to be proper storytelling technique. There are some other films on this list which are bizarre in this same way and decide to just take it all the way off the deep end, whereas this one remains in the realm of sense while still being nonsense at the same time. Interesting.

Genny: I don't think Ermine would like Penguin Highway as much as gauntlet Discord seems to think he would. There are a bunch of hella cute penguins yes, but only one of them gets a name and actual characterization and that one dies so yeah not really screaming Ermine #1. I actually think he'd prefer Birthday Wonderland for Doropo who's a somewhat major character, or Welcome to the Space Show for Pochi, or maybe even Weathering With You because of the general vibe... but I'm digressing again. As far as the little kids crushing on each other and/or significantly older interdimensional ladies I am not here for any of that, but count me in for cute penguins, somewhat cute Jabberwocks, and hilariously stoic precocious brats. From the moment Aoyama started talking I thought I was going to hate him, but his self-awareness or lack thereof in some cases eventually won me over and I did a complete 180. I can't say I cared for any of the other cast members unfortunately, and the side characters here are all varying degrees of one-dimensional (and this is quite ironic given the nature of this film's "mystery") which holds this movie back. One stand-out character does not a movie make.

Johnbobb: Now, this isn't the fault of Penguin Highway specifically, but I've been getting pretty burnt out on coming-of-age movies. I can still appreciate a really great one, but Penguin Highway isn't quite that. Things like the protagonist talking about discovering his love of boobs feel like unnecessary padding onto a film that all-in-all has a pretty short plot. There's a lot of fluff, and a good bit of it is cute, but nothing incredible. Until the endoing, that is. The ending goes full bonkers in a great way that made up for most of the faults I had along the way.

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Congrats to azuarc on being really good at predicting stuff