Teasing Master Takagi-san: The Movie

Nishikata and Takagi enter their last summer of junior high. The arrangement between them has been the same for years: Takagi provokes him, opens a wager, Nishikata loses every time and believes he will win the next. This summer there is a difference; Takagi is moving away. She tells nobody and Nishikata does not know. The holiday begins: the festival, the sea, homework, bicycles and small daily events. Nishikata makes a plan as always and as always it does not hold. The time runs down. Hiroaki Akagi directs. Yuki Kaji and Rie Takahashi are among the voices. The source is Soichiro Yamamoto's comic series. The film came after three television seasons and closes the story. What the narrative builds is not event but repetition; the same game is played again in every section and the difference is in the detail. The matter it treats is the thing not said; both characters know and neither speaks. The animation is quiet and the small town landscape works inside the narrative. Its limit is independence; for someone who has not watched the series the history of the relationship stays missing. Another limit is scale; the narrative is at the scale of a television episode and has not been widened for the cinema. Who it is for: followers of the series and viewers who like quiet Japanese stories about the young. Who it is not for: it is not an entry point, there is little event, and the pace is very low.