To Every You I've Loved Before

SnarkAI Score: 68/100

tldr:

Alternate reality anime films for the multitaskers, mind-benders, and time-twisters among us. Bring your own navigation system and sense of humor as you embark on a journey through different timelines with Koyomi Takasaki, a teenager who's got more forks in his life road than a utensil drawer. It's a surround sound extravaganza with animation as wobbly as a drunken Picasso, but its quirky charm and concept might just reel you in. Watch if you're up for a filmic version of a Rubik's cube or a fan of Schroedinger's cat dilemmas.

Our Scores are generated by SnarkAI's analysis of our reviewer's writing. The tldr summary is drafted by SnarkAI based on that review. All Images are AI-generated based on the reviewer's descriptions of scenes.

To Every You I've Loved Before

Also known as "the Blue Film" To Every You I've Loved Before is one of the two films released simultaneously with an overlapping story of Koyomi Takasaki. The idea of these films is the experience for the viewer changes based on which order they watch the films in.

We watched "To Every You I've Loved Before" first, immediately followed by "To Me, the One Who Loved You".

It's hard to write my typical review of these two films without making watching them a lesser experience than it should be, so I'll avoid my typical point-by-point style and instead say I can see why your perspective of the outcomes of the story would be coloured by how you meet the characters and how you internalise their relationships. it's a clever mechanism, though not entirely unique. It's more Rashamon than the 'choose your own adventure' its sometimes billed to be.

Two two films center around the idea of parrellel worlds, each created by choices people make. Small changes, building to a very different universe, defined as a number of changes between "0" and where you end up. Both films lean heavily into pesudo-scientific langauge to explain the phenomenon, but every time you discovered you left your keys on the table not the bowl like you thought, thats you having shifted from 0 to 1.

The audio leans heavily into the surround sound, sometimes really well, like in a kareoke bar the music being behind you, and sometimes badly, where two people talking in a booth sound like they are at opposite ends of a tunnel.

The animation is inconsistent, some genuinly beautiful scenes and others with some poor proportions and lackluster movement. I suspect there was an A and a B team on these films with the transitional scenes being done by a cheaper animation studio.

Our protagnoist, Koyomi Takasaki, makes a decision when he is 7 years old, whether he lives witih his mother or his father after their divorse, and his life diverges subtabtially from these points. Every You I've Loved Before follows his life living with his mother in her parents huge, run-down mansion.

Both films are an hour and forty long, so independantly they are quite short, but together as they need to be consumed its a long film.

It is worth a watch if you are a fan of Anime, of alternate worlds and you don't mind having to pay a lot of attention to which characters are from what timeline. If you loved Primer then this is an easy to understand film. If you got lost watching Back to the Future you're pro=bably not going to enjoy this.

There's no right answers and a version of you will watch the films in each order so flip a coin and find out if you're in Universe 0 or 1.