Children of the Sea finds plenty of beauty and purpose in the watery depths but doesn’t provide enough grounding first: It’s all too easy to get lost 20,000 leagues under the sea.
Children of the Sea(海獣の子供)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Japan · 2019
1h 50m
Director Ayumu Watanabe
Starring Mana Ashida, Gorô Inagaki, Yū Aoi, Sumiko Fuji
Genre Animation, Fantasy, Adventure, Mystery
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Ruka seems like your standard disillusioned and lonely teenager. That is until the day she meets Umi, a boy who was raised by dugongs and has supernatural connections to the sea. As she explores the new possibilities before her, she must also to get to the bottom of some unusual events occurring out at sea.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
By simply witnessing the grandeur of the sea, by allowing us to glimpse that symbiosis between ocean and universe, the film ends up resonating powerfully, a feast that will stimulate both the eye and the cerebral cortex.
Full of interesting concepts and accomplished animation, Children Of The Sea is less than the sum of its many parts and just seems to lose its way after a very promising beginning.
This wide-eyed loner may be “just” an anime character, but she’s as relatable as any live-action teenager you might meet on screen this year, thanks to the splendid attention to detail and seemingly boundless imagination that characterizes Children of the Sea, director Ayumu Watanabe’s stunning adaptation of the prize-winning manga by Daisuke Igarashi.
One thing is for certain, you haven’t seen an anime movie like this.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
A surging tsunami-crash of creativity and beauty.
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
Children of the Sea is consequently yet another animated fantasy based on hackneyed tropes, like sprite-like martyrs, the guiding hands of fate, and vague nostalgia for a pre-technological past.
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