Sora wo Miageru Shoujo no Hitomi ni Utsuru Sekai, or Munto TV, was the biggest disappointment of the past Winter Season. Here the creators had a great chance to take a flawed OVA, and spread it across the airtime of a TV-series so that the setting and the characters could finally get the chance to be developed properly. So, what do they do? A bloody recap. Only the final three and a half episodes featured new material, which was way too little for a story of this caliber. Still, with a movie scheduled, it still could redeem itself. But yeah, I guess that you can all see by the rating for this review that it obviously didn’t.
Oh, the announcement for the movie sounded so promising. Even though it would also recap the new footage for the TV-series, it did promise that it was going to be just a “director’s cut of various climactic scenes”, with “new footage” and it “ends with a finale”. Looking back, that was the biggest piece of crap that the creators could ever have come up with to promote this movie.
Let’s start with the “new footage”. Let me tell you exactly how much new footage there was in this movie: three minutes. No, seriously, it has some three minutes of strange back-story slapped on the beginning. Apart from that, everything else simply recaps the TV-series.
So, how about the “director’s cut of various climactic scenes”? Well, apparently the creators found every single scene a climactic one, because the rest of the movie is literally every single scene of the new footage of the TV-series. Even the useless comic relief ones. The only part that is missing is the final part of the last episode. You know, the scene that PROMISED THAT THE STORY WASN’T OVER YET.
And how about “ends with a finale”? Well, this movie sure as heck ends with a finale. The same that the TV-series ended with. Yeah, the same finale with its Deus ex Machina climax, the same finale in which the characters started to act completely out of character, and the same finale in which Munto dressed up the three teenaged leads into sailor uniforms with extremely short skirts. What the heck was the point in advertising that!?
It’s a shame. This series really had potential; if only the creators actually made a remake of this series, panned over 26 episodes or something similar, it would have been really good. This, however, is just crap. Even for a recap-movie, it’s incredibly cheap, the way it was advertised, the way it promised so many things, and instead just chose the laziest way out and even failed in terms of storytelling with that ending. If you want to see what Munto is about, check out the TV-series, skip the rest.
| Storytelling: | 1/10 |
| Characters: | 1/10 |
| Production-Values: | 5/10 |
| Setting: | 5/10 |
What a pain =_= Thanks for the warning. It sucks if there aren’t any new scenes. The ending really made me think there could be more to this. Guuuuhhh . . . . what a disappointment
You gave a 9/10 for production values when all they did was reuse footage and slap three minutes of new stuff in? That’s a bit unlike you.
fred: I gave it that score because the graphics were just the same as in the TV-series (as in, really good), but you have a good point. *fixed*
I guess this is what you would call milking a franchise to the bone.
I had dropped this series after the first episodes, and planned to wait for the movie to come to check if it was worth continuing, but looks like I spared myself some grief.
It’s interesting how things like this happen in the anime world. I think in movies the crew would be crucified by the audience ^_^
AlexS: Wouldn’t that be because anime is much more into making franchises of everything? Like with Gundam, or Pokemon. Live-action rarely has interesting enough character designs that even figurines would sell. Re-used footage gets by more easily to begin with, such as with magical girl transformation segments which are usually amusing to see again and become absolutely classic, or with footage for normal scenes just having different audio placed over it, techniques that would make me groan in anything live-action.
Thank’s for the info (aka warning)! =D
So I won’t spend my time for this – since I have some other, unseen, series like Kurau I want to watch.
lol KyoAni
Adapt the newest Key VNs already!
I was actually thinking about watching this anime once. Guess I can save time now by only watching the TV series.
I had a lot of hopes for the TV series when it was announced, since I enjoyed the OVAs wanted to see the story flesh out. But no, instead KyoAni decides to troll us and gave us a bunch of empty promises. I think this is THE biggest disappointment I’ve ever had in anime.
First Haruhi, now this. Kyoani now produces nothing but disappointments and trolls. The End.
I have a disagree with you on all this munto is one of my favorite animes of all time and it truly is a underated anime just shoved under the carpet like its nothing. I believe it has a beautiful story and yes I wish it was a longer series I will agree with you on that but this is only my opinion.