Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
[voices] Kaito Ishikawa, Asami Seto, Yurika Kubo, Nao Toyama, Atsumi Tanezaki, Maaya Uchida, Sora Amamiya, Inori Minase
Intro:
… its deftness of touch and CloverWorks’ vibrant yet grounded animation make for a surprisingly affecting one-two punch of a double feature.
Rascal Does Not Dream… is a slice-of-life anime that doubles as a beginner’s guide to quantum mechanics. Starting out like a less murder-y version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s ‘Out Of Mind, Out Of Sight’, its approach to externalising the phenomena associated with puberty banks on deadpan quirky and mildly questionable jokes about what teen idols should be wearing, with high school student Sakuta trying to figure out why an invisible bunny girl, time loops, and doppelgängers (among other things) are showing up all the while. And after a decent 13-episode run and 2019’s theatrical entry … Of A Dreaming Girl, not one but two follow-ups are now making their way to audiences.
The first sequel, … Of A Sister Venturing Out, is something of a departure for the series. It strays away from talk of Schrödinger’s cats and Laplace’s demons to tell a more straight-forward school drama about Sakuta’s younger sister Kaede trying to ace her exam to get into Sakuta’s high school the following year. While the absence of a core mystery can make this departure feel out of place at times, it still carries the lingering scent of the series’ past brushes with open-wound emotionality, albeit with a less directly fantastical bent. It’s a charming and low-key look at the stresses of schooling, giving an even-handed perspective on the options available.
But it’s with the follow-up, … Of A Knapsack Kid, that things become more traditional, relatively speaking. It bends back around to the initial mystery that the show started with, of a teenager who suddenly becomes invisible to everyone else, applies a bit of multiverse theory (in a way that somehow doesn’t feel tired after the last few years of such yarns), and then continues Sister Venturing Out’s expansion of one of the show’s more traumatic moments to reach premium tear-jerking material. It’s melodramatic as all get out, but it’s well-crafted and delivered melodrama. It operates like a more visceral FLCL in the way that it visualises adolescent emotions that can be difficult to place into exact words, balancing out the turmoil that Sakuta experiences regarding his hospitalised mother with the easy silence created by the more tender moments between him and his sweetheart Mai. It helps that Sakuta himself is still balancing his caring nature and his hormonal impulses in a way that is endearing and rather relatable.
On their own merits, Sister Venturing Out resonates with its look at the importance of choice within education, while Knapsack Kid comes out leaps and bounds ahead, continuing and enhancing the series’ trademark style of giving tangibility to teenage feels. But when taken together, aside from some recurring imagery and motifs, it’s an unassuming rumble that leads into a potential torrent of tears for those with the palette for such things. It may be held back somewhat by its lewdness (insert joke about the double-slit experiment here), but its deftness of touch and CloverWorks’ vibrant yet grounded animation make for a surprisingly affecting one-two punch of a double feature.
