LogFAQs > #941529222

5. The Anthem of the Heart

Karo: 4
Jona: 5
Red: 5
Inviso: 7
Genny: 7
Charon: 7
Johnbobb: 29

Total: 64

Karo: What It Is:
High School Musical - the Japanese edition.

What I Think:
This little known gem is about a group of schookids who produce and perform their own original musical as part of extracurricular activities. The central character of the story is a psychologically mute girl who wants to star in the musical despite her problem.
The strength of the movie it its characters, who are all believable and avoid most of the usual high school anime archetypes. Most people don't even know this film exists, but it deserves to be seen, especially if you like these kind of school life stories.

Score: 89/100

Jona: What Anthem of the Heart does best is incorporating its theme of communication and I really related to the struggles with it. The four main characters are really different and I liked seeing the drama, development and interaction between them as they work together to put on a show. I like how the music is a factor here with its relation to the theme and how it can be used to help express yourself. The movie is a well-put together package that made me emotional.

Red: A girl becomes traumatized by her parents words and creates an egg demon to prevent her from talking for years and years. Unlike many films on this list, the random egg creature she creates is actually a figment of her imagination. Honestly, my favorite part of this movie is the big payoff of the musical in the end. It really felt to me like a great coming together of all the buildup of the rest of the movie. In a list of movies where the ending definitely has a habit of floundering, the musical coming together well and our main character finding her voice again just hit all the right notes to satisfy my brain.

Inviso: It feels like a lot of movies from this section of the list revolve around teenagers with severe social disorders, who go through some weird, almost supernatural learning experience to overcome their flaws and make friends. And Im not gonna lieIm a sucker for these kinds of stories. I dont know where this movie will show up on the overall list, but at the time of this write-up, its placing very well for me, as are quite a few of its compatriots. The main character is sympathetic, and I appreciate the story of how she catches her dad having an affair, he blames her for the subsequent divorce, and that causes her muteness. But beyond just HER, I love the fact that the supporting cast feel like fully fleshed out characters in their own right. Im always intrigued when you have relatively large casts and bother developing each one of them. The arrogant baseball player who realizes he should be a better person, the nice guy nerd who struggles with social situations himself, and the cheerleader who cant bring herself to admit her feelings for said nerdthey all complement each other nicely. The culmination of the storyline is great, with happy endings for all, and Im enjoyed it quite a bit.

Genny: While the various styles of animation used here are absolutely gorgeous, positively A1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRs0OqV4uSc what really sets The Anthem of the Heart apart from other films is its exploration of deeper themes through lighthearted imagery. Tonally it's jarring, almost unnerving when, for example, a father tells his daughter that it's her fault he and her mother are separating. That one cruel act twists and reshapes Naruse's entire personality from that point onward, and I completely sympathize with her struggles with social anxiety and selective mutism. While I'm not usually one to go for high school crush drama, I found all four characters on the Committee tolerable, and even grew to like all of them aside from the jock Daiki Tasaki, who was just a tad too haughty for my tastes. The scene where Naruse finally unpacks all the baggage that's been weighing so heavily on her since childhood was so cathartic and it made me like the often aloof Sakagami at least three times more for voluntarily taking it all in even though I'm sure some of it hurt. I also appreciated that the climactic solution wasn't as easy as him just admitting his love for her was anything more than platonic, which is not a route many films choose to traverse.

Charon: An extremely competent slice of life film that features a small, central group of young characters. This is another film that surprised me with how good it really was, since I expected not to care for this film when we approached watching it on the list. The most unique thing about this movie was the use of the "story within a story", not that that is something new or even not featured elsewhere on this list, but the manner in which it was featured was unique. I thought Jun writing the sad ending for her play but then reversing it when she herself wanted her reality to have the "good ending" and she could see it running parallel to the musical she wrote. I think somewhere she knew that she wasn't destined to be the princess in the fairytale she had in her head, and seeing the musical unfold with how she wanted her life to go was a good watch. The meathead character here was much better than most other uses of the similar trope, also.

Johnbobb: Anthem of the Heart simultaneously gets the awards for having one of the best openings and also one of the biggest wasted oppurtunities. It opens with a tragic moment of a young girl's life, shown through her perspective, with just a hint of fantasy and a lot of her dad being just the shittiest person. I thought that's what this film was going to be, some dark self-reflection told through the eyes of someone who couldn't quite grasp reality. And while it did have the tiniest bit of that, it ultimately became the film's second focus, behind the teen romance melodrama.

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Congrats to azuarc on being really good at predicting stuff