Man, I went into this movie without having any expectations at all since most of the comment section here seems to hate this live action adaption, but honestly, color me surprised, I freaking love this movie sooooooooooooooo much! For anyone who isn't sure if they are gonna like this version of AnoHana after having already seen the original, let me tell you this:

I've already seen the original AnoHana anime series back when it came out in 2011 and I also watch this recap/after story movie as well and I have to say they both had absolutely fantastic story telling, however, I felt like generally the anime versions weren't nearly as emotional than what I felt while watching this live action adaption here. Sure, it had it's issues since the pacing felt a little off at times and they had to shorten some things in order to make everything important into the movie, but that was honestly a good thing. When I watched the anime version, the episodic format of that series had felt way too limiting as well for me, like since the story has been splitt up into mutiple episodes, some emotional events that took place didn't feel as serious since it has been"so long" since they last mentioned some important key plot development in an earlier episode if anyone knows what I mean.

Having this whole story as it's own movie that captivates it's viewers from the beginning til the very end is definitely the best format to tell this absolutely fantastic story about childhood and how children cope with their friend's dead over the years.  People that have very strong opinions about the original anime may be displeased about some changes they had to do in order to make this story appear more realistically, but exactly the additional realism that this adaption provided is the very reason why I think it's the best version of AnoHana. Nothing is more emotional to see real people's sad faces full with tears as even though they are just acting there, I do believe this story speaks to you in an ever deeper emotional level out of pure instinct.

And speaking of the acting, I also have to say that the actors were absolutely fantastic as well! Probably one of the most disliked aspects of live action adaptions  are the way the actors look, since either they try to make them look way too much like their anime counter parts and it looks absolutely horrible since... well, nobody normal in real life looks like an anime character, or they don't even try to make the characters look similar to how they looked like in the original and people feel no connection to the story that they already love. This time however, I genuinely believe that they couldn't have found better actors for each of their positions! Only one character looks drastically different than in the anime since her hair color used to be white and in this version brown, but that's definintely a good decision since white hair would simply look weird and not really relatable to someone in their person life for most of the audience.

So yeah, if you go into this movie open minded and don't compare everything to it's original all the time, trust me, you will definitely have an awesome time and an awesome experience to live through this fantastic story once again! Just don't be too elitistic about it :)

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Having seen all of these low ratings this show received so far, I went into this movie here without any expectations whatsoever and well... color me surprised, as honestly, I really freaking enjoyed it! Yes, the story was kinda all over the place and some things REALLY didn't make any sense whatsoever and yes, many parts really did feel extremely amateurish at times. but given that I played the original Ao Oni almost an entire decade ago and I even had the pleasure to re-live that experience a second time again through somebody's Let's Play series of it, seeing all of the mystery and the blue demon come to live kinda felt really satisfying and interesting to me.

So yeah, personally I'd say that ONLY IF you've played the original Ao Oni and ONLY IF you still have most of the mysteries and puzzles in your head (go replay it right now if you don't!!) then if you don't expect anything at all from this movie and just go into it to watch an extremely interesting take to the Ao Oni storyline, then hell yeah this movie is definitely something up your alley! But otherwise... well, I can't say anything else other that I'd strongly recommend you NOT to watch it. This movie was seriously just made for old time fans that are open for a different take and everyone else will most definitely just be extremely dissatisfied elsway. You have been warned.

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Growing up, I've always been a HUGE fan of the Fatal Frame video game series and overall I do not think this movie here is all that bad or anything, however, I personally really do not believe that it deserves to be part of the 'Fatal Frame' series. I mean, the extremely iconic camera obscure is barely any relevant at all, the backstory of the curse barely made any sense and overall I never really got the impression as if this story's ghost was really all THAT relevant to the story to begin, except maybe to make the protagonists act and eventually solve the entire mystery... which solution ended up being once again extremely far detached from what you'd usually expected from the video games. Overall, if you're looking for a half-decent mystery story with some super natural elements then I guess it's decent enough to be enjoyed, however if you're a fan of the Fatal Frame/Project Zero/ ZERO series, then I strongly do recommend you to not get your hopes up. At least the music in this movie exceeded far above my expectations, so heyy at least it has this going for it which is better than nothing! :D

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"For the person I am right now, there is neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything is merely passing me by." -Yozo Oba

Honestly, I'm really torn on this movie. On one hand, I felt like the entire movie was stretching out for way too long and the absent of any real music accompanying the slow parts made it really boring to watch at times, but on the other hand, I think this is also exactly what makes this whole movie so unique. I mean, the main gist of this story is about how one young guy faces a troublesome amount of existential problems throughout his life, to the point where he is no longer able to find any real reason in mind as everything is just straight up bland and unexciting to him in the end. He feels off, alienated, as if he doesn't know how to act like a normal human being, where without any aim he gets himself from one problem into another. He just wants to feel any purpose in his life. He only wants to be like everybody else, but unfortunately, he seems to fail to do so... That's just one of the best portrayal of depression I've ever seen in fiction.

To come straight to the point though, if you asked me whether I'd recommend this movie to anybody else, then heck, I don't think I would as it really is a rather bland... or well, rather a quite unexciting story to put it like that. Nevertheless, it still does offers you an amazing insight about how people that feel off in life feel like and just for the very fact that somebody finally managed to portray this aspect of humanity in an intriguing movie, which is reason enough already for me to still give it a decent rating in the end. Honestly, it's just one of these stories that can't, or maybe even shouldn't be popular, but I don't exactly think a gloomy movie about the outsider's of society, ever really aimed to be in the spot light. If reading this review made you any curious about all, then please, make sure to watch that movie. Thanks!

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