Generally, I like anime director Akiyuki Shinbo and think Studio Shaft perfectly matches his personal style. However, I admit that he has a very specific style that isn't suited to everything, and not everything he makes works as well as it ought to. The 2017 film "Fireworks" is an odd one, ultimately letting me down for a variety of reasons. Despite having a co-director on the project, I feel that every issue I had can be contributed to Shinbo himself, or possibly due to the production not committing fully to his style from the start.First, the outline of the story is as follows: it seems to be a normal day at a Japanese junior high school, with the town excited for the fireworks display occuring later that night. A baffling argument between a group of boys carries on throughout the movie, regarding whether or not fireworks are "round or flat" when they explode. We see Nazuna has her own problems, as her mother is making her move away soon to live with the mother's new boyfriend. In a moment of chance and planning, Nazuna makes a bet with two boys at the school pool to race, and tells herself she'll ask the winning boy to go on a date with her to the fireworks show, with the intention to ask for his help that night to run away from her family and "elope." Norimichi is our lead boy, but he loses to his friend Yusuke. Yuskue ultimately skips the date, leaving Norimichi a chance to talk with Nazuna partly out of pity and partly out of a possible existing crush he has for her. It's a simple, possibly too simple, setup for a youthful romance.However, the plan doesn't work out and Nazuna is quickly found out and dragged home by her mother. Norimichi, the boy who watches her get dragged away, stands in frustration, both for being unable to do anything and for his friend being so cruel in the first place to a girl in need. So he picks up a glass sphere Nazuna dropped (a mysterious thing that she found that morning in the ocean), and throws it in anger, wishing he could redo that day. To his surprise, the ball shines and he is transported back to the swim race, able to change things for the better. As expected, he does this a few times over, trying to reach the best outcome for both himself and Nazuna. What was initially a simple love story became a simple time-travel adventure.From the start, there's a few problems with the storytelling. The first issue was that I couldn't tell if this was meant to be a family-friendly movie or not. From the description, trailers, and character ages, I assumed this was intended to be fine for children. And yet, within the first few minutes we get a group of boys on their way to school, describing with excitement the sizes of breasts owned by their fellow classmates and teachers. A few scenes later, a boy casually says to the other a slang phrase that suggests he was about to go masterbate in the school's washroom after seeing a female student in her swimsuit. 2017 proved to be an especially inappropriate time for this type of humor, but even in the most offending anime, I haven't seen behavior that seemed this cringe-worthy. As reference, the students are expected to be between 13 and 15 years of age in this movie. Now, if the rest of the movie committed to a more adult subject matter, then this sexual content in passing might not seem so out of place: most of Shinbo's past work was never quite this bad, but added mature violence or cruel humor to make it part of a whole. Either make the film for familes or for 18+ only! Don't make me confused going in or coming out about what the intended audience was!Another issue is how generally unlikable or poorly written the characters seem to be. I mentioned the boys, where despite their endearing hanging-together friendship is, appear dumb and crude. Yusuke is horribly written and inconsistent, typically unable to stop talking about his own crush on Nazuna, but being cruel in ditching her when he finally has a chance to go on a date, and then later becoming visibly jealous when he sees Norimichi with her (this might be related to the poorly used time-leaping through dimensions point, which I describe in the next paragraph). Norimichi himself is perhaps the most boring lead I have ever seen in an anime, something I am usually not so sensitive to. Even Nazuna barely comes across as a character in her own right: she is just a object fullfilling a male fantasy as a beautiful girl in need of a hero, with just enough flirting through dialogue and eye glances, but unable to act for herself beyond her naive intentions. Her revealed crush on Norimichi comes out of nowhere, again as if Norimichi's dreams are coming true before his eyes. For a film where both genders are kind of important, to have a story so clearly written by a man as self-fullfilling fantasy is a bit distracting.
And finally, we have the fantasy time-leaping aspect. This ultimately has the most promise in lifting the movie, even if the mechanism behind what is happening is left intentionally vague (again, as if in a dream, they might as well have written it to have Norimichi simply snap his fingers rather than use the ball at all). After a couple jumps, Norimichi catches on that he is jumping to alternate futures that take place in different universes, each slightly different than his own. This manifests through slightly different behaviors from the characters, or from unusual physics (in one funny scene, Normichi first catches on when he watches the fireworks, and sees them to be impossibly flat after all). Does it matter if he can't go back to his own place and time, as long as he is happy? In one of the final scenes, a beautiful shot captures what the film tried so hard to convey, when the glass ball breaks into millions of shards, each representing their own possible future, with Normichi being asked in the moment which he might pick given the chance. But beyond that is the final scene, an intentionally vague and open ending that will leave even the most attentive viewers baffled, and one in which even over-analyzed conclusions can't be agreed upon, and where said conclusions don't necessarily make the story feel at all satisfying.These are major issues, but even from a moment to moment review, it feels like the story never really comes across properly, as if the storyboards and script were written by a highschool student without revisions or edits to polish it. It's especially disappointing because the themes intended for the time-travel parts, and the simple romance of youth at the center of the movie, in themselves hold promise. This could have been a good movie, or even a great one. Instead, the production team comes across as being lazy. One only needs to look at the visuals to determine "lazy" being a factor here. Studio Shaft has a unique style that rarely ever looks bad, but here it looks especially uninspired. We do have a couple moments of creative 3D archtecture in the school building, and one or two nice scenes that make use of the animation and camera layout. But then we also get lazy 3D character models replacing 2D animation during 3D camera shots, happening often enough to be noticable thanks to stiff stand-ins. The glass ball itself and its effect looks utterly generic, despite its fantastical inspirations. And the characters? Its difficult to distinguish them from any other Shaft anime, moreso than any said anime I can recall. This is one of the few occurances where an English dub was produced for one of Shinbo's anime (courtesy of GKIDS in North America, although after having seen the film I wonder if they have any regrets with the film being added to their catalogue), and while it isn't horrible, it doesn't fair well with the writing. The only element I couldn't find particular fault with was the music (even the random idol musical number in the middle wasn't too bad).Some films can be so-bad-it's-good (see "Psychic School Wars" as a good example, also a school-set romantic fantasy anime), but "Fireworks" never really reaches that level of silliness for me to recommend it (although its strange sense of humor does make it come close). I admit that its story, being a dream come true for a young boy, speaks to a younger me on a basic level, and when paired with humor and child-friendships that (sometimes) feels authentic, it can be fun to watch in the moment. But my gosh, it is a mess, one that desparately needs a redo, either as a new film, series, or a short novel.