Nerawareta Gakuen
Nerawareta Gakuen means “The Targeted School” in Japanese – it’s the same “nerae” as in “Ace wo Nerae”. The film was introduced to us at the screening yesterday as “Psychic School Wars”, based on a massively popular YA sci-fi novel that obviously no-one in the screening (least of all Jonathan Clements, giving the pre-screening introduction) had heard of.
If the film ever gets released as Psychic School Wars then Shochiku are total idiots.
I’m going to get discussion of the narrative out the way first because the narrative is the weakest point of the film. For about 2/3 to 3/4 of the movie it's pretty good, but it is not without its problems.
What this NeraGaku is really about is communication and connections between people. It does take the original story as a basis – of a school council controlled by a psychic student and the students who rebel against them – and updates the basics of it for the modern era; a girl driven to suicide by people writing insults on the blackboard in the 70s is now the victim of cellphone bullying, for instance (and the character doesn’t have the same story arc overall anyway). However, it is a completely different take on the material, not only complicating the science fiction elements but radically adjusting the focus away from pure pulp fiction to something more romantic – whether telepathy can really reveal what’s in other people’s souls, how to communicate true feelings, that kind of thing. All that, and Shakespeare references that make sense!
I’ve done some swotting up on the original novel (and I’ve seen one of the live action film adaptations already) and it’s become very clear that Nakamura deliberately subverts the audience’s expectations by doing this. The film is something of a sequel – characters from the original novel appear in it – but where this film traces similar paths to the original story it goes out of its way to change the outcomes for drama - or completely undermine them for comic effect. If the novel’s as well known to Japanese audiences as I think it might be, I can absolutely see this working for the film – but for an audience that knows nothing about it beyond a misleading English title this side of the film is completely lost.
The slice-of-life / romantic / whatever you want to call it elements – personally I’m going to trigger the firehawk alarm and say mono no aware, because that’s really a huge element of the plot by the end – are written very well IMO. None of the relationship drama is dragged out unnecessarily and the character writing is generally very strong and believable; the film’s emotional moments worked perfectly for me.
Unfortunately the handling of the sci-fi elements is haphazard. There are a couple of plot points in the film that would be potentially interesting if they were introduced properly, but seem to come out of almost nowhere. The worst offender is the whole climactic sequence of the film, where it seems that whole concepts are introduced out of the blue in order to provide an exciting denouement. What’s going on is great to look at, and the dialogue the characters are saying isn’t poorly written, but... it’s not that it doesn’t make sense, but it just appears to have no explanation as to why it’s happening other than “because it needs to”. Maybe stuff has been cut for time – it’s already a long-for-anime film at about 2 hours – but for people with no idea what the film was going to be about other than (supposedly) Psychic School Wars, the ending in particular really seems to have put people off, and this is a pretty major flaw.
I don’t want to bang on about the narrative’s problems, though, because there is so much good in this film otherwise IMO, not least of all from a technical perspective.
First up, it’s a beautiful film before you even discuss the animation. For those worried about the lens flare effects in the trailers, they are prevalent but never overwhelming. While every scene is awash in colour, it only becomes overbearing when the story requires it to – there’s a wonderful flashback scene that uses sensory overload as something of a plot point, for instance. For the four fans of Ryosuke Nakamura’s work in this thread, there are plenty of sakura petals, CG trains and gloriously sunny days in this film!
The animation is very lively – there’s a lot of interesting and/or graceful movement (and it was particularly pleasing to see traditionally animated accurate piano playing!). The comedic elements particularly benefit from the liveliness of the film – the female lead wants to be an athlete and she never merely walks anywhere, she’s always leaping and whirling wherever she goes, and it’s very entertaining to watch. What CG is used is generally very effective – aside from the trains, it’s generally used purely for supernatural elements and is pretty damn spectacular when it is used. Musically, the film goes to virtually every Japanese director’s favourite style – understated, wistful piano themes in general – which are always pleasing, and a couple of vocal numbers. The acting, as far as I can tell, was very good, although the voice direction is very much in traditional anime style.
I guess this veeeery long post feels to me like it focuses on the negatives, but without being able to post pictures or show videos it’s difficult to show what works so well about the film when it does work. I was mentally comparing it to Wolf Children in quality for a good half hour or so at the start, I thought it was that good.
Maybe I’m biased – I have been looking forward to this film since its announcement, and I am absolutely inclined to see the best in it. I genuinely do think there is a LOT of “best” in it, though – but whether other people are happy to see past the deeply flawed climax I don’t know. I’d be delighted to see the film again when I have the opportunity and re-examine it to see if it holds together better.
TL;DR - beautiful and generally very entertaining film unfortunately let down by poor handling of its genre elements, particularly to the detriment of the film's ending
