To Me, the One Who Loved You

Koyomi grows up at the research centre where his father works. The centre studies parallel worlds, and a person can cross into another one with a device. As a child he meets Shiori there and they fall in love as they grow. Then his father marries Shiori's mother. The two of them are now counted as siblings. Realising they cannot be together in this world, they use the centre's device and cross into a parallel world where the marriage did not happen. There they are free, but that world holds another life, and the price of it appears years later. Kenichi Kasai directs. The film is adapted from a novel by Yomoji Otono. It is a Japanese production. This film was not made on its own; together with its twin, which tells the same story in another parallel world, it opened on the same day, 7 October 2022, and the two were animated by different studios. The two films complete each other; a detail that stays in the background of one becomes the main line of the other. The source novels were also published on the same day, in 2016. The matter it treats is the price of a choice; crossing into one world means losing the other. The narrative spreads over decades and the characters grow old. The film explains the rules of its parallel worlds in detail and takes the science fiction seriously. The narrative refuses a romantic solution and proposes another kind of loyalty at the end. Its ending is only completed together with the other film. Its limit is independence; watched alone it is incomplete, and the rules get tangled in places. Who it is for: viewers who like science fiction romance and anime drama. Who it is not for: it is complicated, it asks for two films, and the ending is sad.