Sora no Otoshimono: Tokei-jikake no Angeloid – Review

Sora no Otoshimono’s unsubtle and uninspired humour condensed into one picture. If you happen to like this you may actually be able to laugh during the movie.

Sora no Otoshimono: The Would-Be Girlfriend – The Movie

Sorry for the long break the blog has taken but well, there’s a first time for everything, right? Anyway that was that and there’s plenty of new animes to talk about so no reason to dwell on the past here. Water under the bridge, spilled milk and all that. Sora no Otoshimono: The Movie is quite the extraordinary project, I have to admit. Retelling the events of the series is one thing, actually turning a recap-episode into a movie quite another. Who the hell had that great idea? But there’s also a new story in the movie. Go figure who thought that I needed to watch a recap-episode to get what was going on in the boring story in the second half.

Summary:
Release-Date: 2012
Running Time: 97 minutes
Synopsis: A short flashback of what happened in prequel of Heaven’s Lost Property series until there’s an Angel, Hiyori Kazane who is dreaming while her real body is in heaven. She had a crush on the main protagonist, Tomoki Sakurai who fight until the end where the world has memory about Hiyori erased when she died in her dream and returned to her real body. She wanted to return to her dream so much that she got modified into an Angeloid of Clockwork by heaven’s master but got back consciousness with help of Tomoki. However, it was not enough to save her life.
– ANN.

The only times the movie comes close to having good humour is when it’s self-referential but that only makes you realize all the more how unsophisticated the movie’s humour is.

Review:
Let’s get the essentials out of the way first: Do I need to watch the series before watching this? No. Will this movie be more enjoyable, though, if one has seen the series? Again, no. In contrast to The Disappearance of the Suzumiya Haruhi which continues to tell the story of the series or Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime which retells the story of the series in a new way this movie is trying to appeal to fans of the series and those who aren’t. And the idea the movie had was to make therefore this thing 40% recap, 60 % new stuff. Of course that’s an idea as shitty as shitty ideas for a movie can get, I think.
Let’s start with the recap-stuff. I hate recaps. If you’re like me and you hate recaps this movie is definitely not for you. I say, recaps are for babies… or people with Alzheimer. For everyone else: Completely useless. So, seeing 20 minutes of recap in a series is frustrating so imagine how it’s like to watch 40 minutes of it in this movie. I was horribly bored. It’s weird that a movie that tries to continue to tell of stuff happening after the second season’s end starts with a long recap retelling the most important moments of the series.
“Most important moments of the series?”, you might ask, “This is episodic comedy, isn’t it?” and that’s the problem: This series should have no ‘important moments’. So let’s first talk about the drama of this series. Like Gintama it takes the stuff it’s supposed to make fun of and takes it completely serious for one arc (like any other generic crappy shounen-series out there). And it does that even more often than Gintama. It’s no surprise therefore that the second half of the movie is the corniest kind of crappy over-the-top-melodrama you can imagine. Just listening to Hiyori swoon over Sakurai is making me want to walk away from this. This story is so retardedly generic that I have no idea how one would want to make an entire arc out of it. So I will spoil the whole thing here because you know what? It’s a stupid story worth shit so it doesn’t deserve to go ‘unspoiled’ for this review. The story is about Hiyori, a shy, humble girl who likes farming, has lost her parents in a tragic accident and loves her hometown. She also gets on well with old people (who are rarely the cranky monsters in animes normal old people are) and rises every day to spend time on some little field doing her farming and then Sakurai arrives walking to school. And Hiyori hides because she secretly likes Sakurai. “Why?”, you may ask. Because that’s the story, that’s why. If this kind of retarded plothook doesn’t make you want to walk away from this you probably don’t watch this for the story. Now the story continues to show how in the recap Hiyori spends an eternity watching shit unfold as the episodic comedy with blatant fanserivce kicks in time and again (more about that later). But as the drama kicks in she decides to join the club (you know, the one the main-character and the rest of the cast is in). And then shit happens and in a very dramatic scene feelings are confronted and Hiyori confesses to Sakurai. But she flees and asks him to answer her tomorrow because for some reason she couldn’t simply wait for Sakurai’s answer a few minutes right there or something. And the next day Sakurai is already preparing himself to go to the place to answer her feelings (or something, you know how vague these shounen-series are when it comes to romantic developments). It was already known at this point that Hiyori was actually an Angeloid but it’s not like she was walking around with weird wings and shit, not that this is of any importance at all to the characters image in this setting so the way I see it I don’t really need to give a shit about this revelation… Anyway, meeting is about to happen and Hiyori is on her way – but ‘meets’ a truck instead so-to-speak. Now some sci-fi-weirdness and shounen-action ensues whose details are dull as hell and… yeah, emotional finale and Hiyori sacrifices herself to save her nice little town. Ah, yeah and she also thanks Sakurai for being such a great guy and kisses him. But what really takes the cake here is that Sakurai’s response is “I won’t forget you. I will always remember the first girl who said ‘I love you.’ to me.”. That’s it? All this emotional turmoil and he just goes “Gee, that’ll make a nice chapter for my biography.”? So in the end the drama wasn’t only corny as hell but also completely insignificant. I guess I should add that I read the manga and I didn’t like the arc there and I didn’t like it in the movie. Not very surprising, one might say, but I always hope that animes would realize that adapting a work doesn’t mean you only have to make up the ending since the manga is still ongoing. I say, just make it all up. Hiyori’s story-arc is crap and was just a cheap change of pace for the manga. If I would want to make a movie based on this I would try harder to make more out of this. There would’ve been no need for the recaps then also, I guess. Instead it’s crappy drama with forgettable characters.

I’m not sure whether it was intentional but having the girl use her cute voice to say that she’ll shoot his heart while holding a loaded gun is pretty funny, I have to admit. It made me wish she would actually try it. It would be like School Days all over again…

Yeah, the characters… Going through the fast-forward-version with the recaps really showed that these Angeloids are flat one-dimensional characters from start to finish. And that makes them annoying as hell whenever the series expects me to care about them. Nymph going the Tsundere-route with her behavior just makes her as annoying as Shana. Ikaros… well, her personality is basically to have not really one actually. Also, master this, master that… Jesus, can juvenile wish-fulfillment in shounen-anime get any more obvious than that? The point of those Angeloids fleeing from heaven is to not have a master who can abuse them! What the hell does this series want to say by saying it’s okay since Sakurai becomes their master? “Slavery is bad? Of course not! Having to serve an evil slavemaster is bad but being a slave? Totally fine, nothing bad about that.”. And the whole thing just gets creepier with the romantic notions attached to the whole ridiculous idea. Instead of making it a growing-up-kinda-story about the Angeloids’ newfound freedom it’s a story about Sakurai building his harem. Apparently there’s a serious side to this series but I really don’t know why I should give a shit about heaven. Some badass-angel disabuses female angel-robots? Boo-fucking-hoo, at least he’s not destroying the world. I can think of worse evils needed to be addressed in this world than some sadistic psycho up in the sky with a robot-fetish. But Sakurai is of course the caring type who gets all serious and sentimental at the sight of someone not singing “All you need is love” along with him. In the next minute, though, he spouts crap about all the perverted stuff anyone would consider creepy. Why? Because he’s supposed to be funny.
Now we come to the humour of Sora no Otoshimone. It’s less an issue of this movie but with 40% recaps you need to address the general flaws of the series as well, I guess. In the drama it takes a backseat of course but it’s still there. To take an original scene out of the movie: Nymph while confronting Hiyori and Sakurai about their relationship asks him why they were buying lipstick. And he answers that he thought using lipstick on his nipples would feel good and it would be embarrassing for a guy to buy lipstick alone. All the comedy of this series is like that. It’s the blatant “Look, I’m funny!”-kinda humour with no subtlety or complexity to speak of. I didn’t laugh once during the movie. Of course you can partly blame the dull characters for that but the perverted humour of the series just isn’t funny, I think. If you want to make fun of perverseness then you gotta push the limits of social acceptability here. Perverseness isn’t ‘nice stuff’ and if you want to make fun of something like that, you really have to go down into the mud with it. Some kiddy-friendly pants-jokes just don’t cut it. If you want to make your main-character a pervert and you want to make fun of it then you gotta be ready to make him seem like a bad guy. Actually you might end up hating him while also laughing about him. But what else are you gonna do with it? Being perverted isn’t good, it won’t get nicer by repeating the same dull simple-minded jokes over and over again. Sakurai is supposed to be the hero in the serious scenes and a despicable pervert to be laughed about in the ‘funny’ scenes. But uniting those ambitions really doesn’t help either of those.
When you look at the beginning with Soraha becoming a giant to battle a giant chicken you actually already see the epitome of this movie’s capabilities. It ends with Sakurai seeing her panties while the intro-song says something like “Her huge panties can be seen but do you mind?! (No we don’t mind!)”. Self-referential humour is a bit more interesting than the usual “Look, I’m funny!”-humour done by this show but I mean, that can’t be all, right? It’s like one of these normal scenes where Sakurai manages to take a peek at her panties only this time everyone can see them – and they’re huge. That’s not really what I would call sophisticated comedy.

Starting with a boring recap of the first two seasons after forty minutes the movie starts with the real story. And with that I mean a corny story with all the stereotypes you can think of shounen-series use in these melodramatic stories. It’s also vague in terms of its emotional themes like every long-running shounen-series which means that there’s no real development or emotional pay-off at the end. With dull characters and uninteresting humour this movie is really only for the die-hard fans of Sora no Otoshimono out there. Anyone else will probably feel mightily bored by this.

Rating: 3/10