I think the first time I realized being upside down is one of the scariest things a human being could actually do was not going on a rollercoaster — it was getting tombstone piledrived by my older brother in middle school. It’s been a while since then. The only satisfaction to experience having my perspective shift was on various rollercoaster rides. (Think of rides in Wildwood and Six Flags.). So wait, I bet you’re asking, what does that have to do with Patema Inverted?
It basically is a movie about seeing things upside down.
I checked out Patema Inverted March 8, as it’s film festival time, and the NYCIFF’s showing it (it’ll be shown again this upcoming Saturday). This particular anime film happens to be from director Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Time of Eve) and the crew at Purple Cow Studios. Just wanna point out that I’m still waiting for my Time of Eve BD from the Kickstarter. That out of the way, you know I came up with a few expectations since I’ve heard good things about Time of Eve (I haven’t watched it), and after watching this film, I came out of it just thinking “This ain’t no Wolf Children.”
Of course, both are entirely different works, with the only comparison between the two being that I saw them at NYICFF. And Wolf Children is at least a tier or two above Patema Inverted. After Wolf Children was over and I left the SVA Theatre, I was thinking how touching and wonderful the work was. When Patema Inverted was over, I was disappointed. This isn’t to say it was bad. The problem is it felt like it was too ambitious, and littered with unremarkable character development.
The story revolves around Patema, a young girl who dwells in the underground world, and Age, one of the remaining people living on Earth, or the surface world. Patema accidentally falls into the surface world and meets Age. Both manage to be confused by each other and how they each can walk upside down (they really just have different perspectives). But before they can really get to understanding each other, a group that works in Age’s school finds out about Patema, and they try to capture her.
One thing I liked about Patema Inverted was its usage of being upside-down. It’s something I have personally yet to see in anime, so I found it refreshing. For example, we know how it’s great to look at the sky from a human perspective, as we look up at it and it sometimes can be beautiful.
Patema, however, only sees the sky looking down, and falling down would be death. So she can’t really even enjoy seeing the stars because it’s not familiar to her. That’s what she gets for spending her time underground. It’s little stuff like that that gets me going. Also the way flying was explored — both Age and Patema would have to hold onto each other, sometimes in awkward positions.
This, basically
But as I kept thinking back about what kept this work from being something I’d consider great, it’s probably the characters. While the movie is kind of ambitious in what it wants to tell — we have the upside down theme, but then there’s two different worlds that could be explored, then we still have the appearance of someone else from Patema’s world and how he impacted Patema and Age, etc — I came to the conclusion that it’s not really the big problem. These characters just don’t really stand out. Patema’s the kind of the excited kid on the block who immediately turns into mush when she’s out of her element. Age’s your usual shounen male lead protagonist who does nothing special. What half-saves them is they don’t get super-powers so they have to actually grow up.
Aside from those two, the villain in this film is someone that seems evil just to be evil, no real reason for him to do what he does. We have a red-haired side character who clearly was meant to get more time in the film but probably had her more vital roles cut due to time, so she just feels like a waste. Basically, there wasn’t anyone who stood out and improved the film. This only leaves the elements that were supposed to be expressed to stand out there kind of naked with little support. And that sucks.
So is this still worth your time? I’d lean yes. The visuals are a big standout of the work, and while I felt the characters held the anime back from being great, they didn’t hold it back from being good. That and there were some moments of hilarity so…that counts I swear. Considering I’ve heard good things about Time of Eve though, it’s unfortunate it wasn’t much better to me.
