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Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva Movie Review

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva is a 2009 anime mystery film directed by Masakazu Hashimoto. It is an unexpectedly strong, wonderful adaptation of a classic game series.

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“The gift of Eternal Life can only be given

to the one that passes all the challenges“

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An amateur sleuth attends an opera starring one of his former students, but the performance is just a cover for a competition to uncover the secret to eternal life. As a big fan of the Professor Layton puzzle adventure game franchise, I was utterly charmed with this movie adaptation. This was planned to be the first in a series of many Layton movies, but unfortunately others never materialized, which is a shame as this one was so good. It remains one of the more underrated anime flicks in recent memory.

The film is set between the fourth and the fifth installments in the series – ‘The Last Specter’ and ‘The Miracle Mask’ respectively. This means that it belongs to the prequel trilogy when Luke was younger and when Emmy was with them on their journeys. Let’s first talk about the characters. I was blown away by how faithful all of them were to their game counterparts. The entire movie is so faithful, in fact, that it genuinely resembled a long string of cutscenes from the games, which was just wonderful to witness.

Layton is just as badass and as smart as he always has been. Him solving the puzzles is accompanied by a particularly inspired and cool sequence where we see his deduction at play. Luke is especially bratty in this story and it was very funny seeing his desperate plight for approval from the professor. The dynamic between the two is just as amazing as always and how Layton would protect him every single time was heartwarming.

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Emmy is surprisingly sidelined in the bigger scope of things, but her having a separate adventure of sorts mostly worked. She is a great fighter, which made her an indispensable part of the team once again. The comedic highlight has to be Inspector Grosky. He’s reliably buffoonish and his goofy escapades are so funny, in particular his fight with the sharks. His design was superb with his ridiculous hairstyle and bustling chest hair. He is so hilarious that I wished the rest of the movie had more humor to go along with him as well.

Descole turned out to be the main villain here, which was a disappointing turn of events as he isn’t among the best Layton villains in my opinion. A much better choice would have been Don Paolo himself. The whole drama with Melina and Janice was overwrought, though well written. They aren’t the most memorable of characters, but the premise of a girl being brought back to life through another girl was interesting and the final sequence with her father was quite moving.

What bothered me here was the entire third act. The whole mythic ancient city storyline did not really go anywhere. Yes, that final eruption of the city was powerful and the use of music in the movie was typically Japanese and intriguing, but more often than not the film attempted to be a musical to the detriment of the mystery at hand. The multiple storylines going concurrently led to a script that is ambitious, but not always successful at executing these ideas.

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But the main problem is the action. It was way too long in the final stretch and I was personally bored with the mecha fight itself, though the sword fight was cool. The twists were inferior to the best twists in the original series and the chaotic pacing and overloud action in the third act really offset the much better and more nuanced first half.

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva features mostly excellent animation. The use of CGI was obvious at times and not particularly well done, but the hand-drawn style was fantastic and wonderfully old-fashioned. Some of the character designs and scenery pleasantly reminded me of a Ghibli movie. This isn’t the most polished of animations, but it worked because it was very faithful to the source material. The score was also phenomenal as was the dialogue. They also brought back all the original actors for the US version of games and the result was outstanding voice acting throughout.

Another highlight is the addition of puzzles themselves in the proceedings and how they were incorporated was quite inspired. They are much easier than the ones in the games, which made the movie a more leisurely experience. The detective mystery elements were phenomenal and so was the ship and island setting, both beautifully explored.

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