Psychic School Wars Review (Anime)
Psychic School Wars might lead you to think of students battling with psychic powers but it’s really a romance with comedy and drama elements, and sci-fi undertones.
The first thing I noticed is how good the visuals and audio are, with Sunrise on animating duty, but also how natural the characters feel. Well, until transfer student Ryouichi Kyougoku comes along, claiming that he has psychic powers. The story follows Kenji Seki who lives a normal, happy life where he walks his dog each morning so that he can see his crush, the attractive Kahori Harukawa, as she surfs each morning. His childhood friend Natsuki Suzuura teases him for it, especially as he left his fly unzipped, but she has problems of her own which Kenji comes to learn. Psychic School Wars is a story about growing up, learning how to deal with love and jealousy, and a sci-fi theme which, honestly, I wish wasn’t present as I feel it didn’t benefit the story so much as it gave the chance for Sunrise to pull off some stunning visuals that they couldn’t pull off with a story more strongly rooted in reality.
Whilst I think that the general character interactions are superb, the sci-fi element isn’t something that sat well with me. I didn’t like Kyougoku, who reminds me a fair bit of Kaworu from Evangelion, and thought it added unnecessary plotlines to a story that already had enough strong tales to follow. The sci-fi element holds it back and everytime it hides away long enough for you to be engrossed in what’s happening to the characters and what they’re feeling and experiencing, the sci-fi theme comes back into play and had me rolling my eyes – I really don’t like Kyougoku or his role in the story. I got fed up with the sci-fi element roughly midway through the film, and ended up wanting it to finish as it destroyed all of the good work the early beginning of the film presented, and instead tried to drag it down with an eye-rolling plot that feels out of place. It gets worse and worse as it goes along, and I just can’t believe that the story ended up being so utterly poor, so offensively awful – I think stupid is a pretty fitting term here.
I’m a big fan of Sunrise and I certainly cannot fault their work here – Psychic School Wars is absolutely beautiful. There are plenty of stretching, colourful landscapes, excellent character design and some breathtaking, lush sceneries and buildings that come from a world that is filled with beauty. The lighting, wind and weather are so expertly animated that it’s not too ridiculous to say that I could almost imagine feeling the breeze and warmth from the sun. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that this is one of the most visually impressive animated films that I’ve seen, and I’d have loved for my first viewing to have been on Blu-Ray rather than DVD but the spectacular work still was not lost.
There’s the option to watch it in English or Japanese so I picked the former and thought that it sounded very natural, working towards making the more down to Earth parts of the film even better. Supercell perform the opening theme which, like the rest of the OST, tends to be a chill, relaxing set of tunes that I’d happily listen to outside of the film. Many of the tracks are piano-centric, and the film features Debussy’s classic Clair de Lune. The OST compliments the film nicely but, again, I preferred it when it was focusing on the interactions between the characters.
I have to say I thought the sci-fi parts of Psychic School Wars really did bring the movie down, and took away focus from the characters in a negative way, and I disliked the whole ‘taking over the school’ plot with the flat Kyougoku and his talking cat-monster. Some characters speak so much about not using mobile phones so that we can connect more that it’s hard not to wonder if I’m watching an elaborate message from the creator where they have an intense hatred for mobile phones. I don’t think it was a good plot line whatsoever, to the point that the mobile phones fuss along with Kyougoku and the pretty dire sci-fi elements left me with a sour taste in my mouth, and I don’t think I’ll be watching this again because of it.
It’s a hard recommendation as the film doesn’t ever feel like it knows what exactly it wants to be or what it wants to say, and I found myself wishing that it dropped the sci-fi entirely and that it ended far, far sooner than it did. It has fantastic ideas that get swamped by an attempt to stand out, and it doesn’t succeed and ends up being a massive disappointment with little of the plot ever worth experiencing. Psychic School Wars is a film I wanted to love and I was excited to watch it, but that’s a feeling I won’t ever have again regarding this film. The reason this final paragraph is so long is because I have to restrain myself from ranting on and on about how simply bad this film gets the more it plods along, and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone unless you want to watch it to see how bad it is for yourself – the ending itself was okay, but too little too late. Maybe the novel is better but I’ve no interest in checking it out.
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