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Drifting Home Movie Review

Drifting Home is a 2022 fantasy adventure anime film directed by Hiroyasu Ishida. It’s a disappointing anime.

During summer break, sixth graders Kosuke and Natsume play in an apartment building set to be demolished. They find themselves caught up in a strange phenomenon. All they can see around them is a vast sea. My biggest problem with this movie is that this is yet another family flick that fails to function as an adventure, but is instead so extensively focused on interpersonal relationships and psychological issues to the point that it became overbearing.

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I found most of the drama between the characters overwrought unfortunately. It works to a degree, but it was needlessly accentuated and it overtook the narrative way too much. I would have much rather had the kids have some sort of adventure on an open sea.

With that being said, the main two characters were well developed as both Kosuke and Natsume were wonderfully voiced and they got serious arcs and backstories that worked. Their relationship is the emotional crux of the story. It’s a shame, then, that the supporting characters suffered as a result of this strong emphasis on the aforementioned two, leading to the rest of the children feeling like an afterthought.

Drifting Home features wonderful animation. The scenes on the ocean are particularly mesmerizing, but I also found the first act stunning with the more urban area being superbly realized. This is where my interest for the movie was still going strong, but unfortunately it dwindled in the second half due to a variety of reasons.

One is that overly slow pacing. The other is the repetitive nature to the dialogue and the story. Again, some of this is quite touching and the main characters were easy to love, but had the movie been streamlined in runtime and pace, it would have been much more effective. This way, it is only solid with the director’s previous feature ‘Penguin Highway’ being more interesting and unique than this standard family drama.

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