Clannad: The Motion Picture

Tomoya is in his last year at school and does not attend classes. His mother is dead, he does not speak to his father, and he has no plan for the future. One morning on the way to school he sees a girl; she is standing at the bottom of the slope saying something to herself. Nagisa is repeating a year because of illness and knows nobody in her class. She wants to reopen the drama club, which has been closed. Tomoya helps her. They need to find people for it. There is also a story Nagisa tells; a girl living in a world where there is nobody. Osamu Dezaki directs. Kenji Nojima, Mai Nakahara, Ryotaro Okiayu and Kikuko Inoue are among the voices. It is a Japanese production. The source is the visual novel by the Key studio; a television series was made from the same source. This film is a separate adaptation from the series and orders its events differently; most of the secondary characters are left out. Dezaki is known for a manner of his own; the held frames and pastel transitions are here too and do not resemble the series' visual language. The matter it treats is loss; the story runs through family and illness. The narrative does not tell the whole game in two hours and chooses a single line. The film was argued over among followers of the source; its choices were not liked. Its limit is structure; the narrative is compressed, the characters incompletely introduced, and the ending rushed. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese animation and melodrama. Who it is not for: it is compressed, the emotional dose high, and the ending abrupt.