Nerawareta Gakuen is a science fiction movie with lots of romance. A new student named Kyogoku transfers into Seki’s school. Turns out that Kyogoku is from the future and has only come to the present to awaken psychics to help the future.
Nerawareta Gakuen is pretty slow in the beginning. I waited 29 minutes for something interesting to happen with the science fiction element of this movie. Before that point it is mostly just love triangles and not even very interesting ones. The most cliched love triangles out there. Seki’s childhood friend loves him, but he likes another girl who is interested in the new handsome transfer student. The characters are pretty stereotypical to go along with that love triangle which makes the interactions between them very boring to watch. The slow beginning was not even the only pacing problem. They had the ending going very fast, but somehow had time to put in the group of kids messing around all over the place. The things that should have been glossed over went on too long while important things needed to understand what is going on were bypassed quickly.
The artwork shows a lot of nature and cuts away from the characters talking to show water, trees, or other beautiful nature scenes. It is pretty confusing at times since the show is not about nature. There should be more focus on the actual characters talking than the babbling brook. It starts to make more sense later, since they might be showing how the planet shows no signs of dying or trying to show why Kyogoku is so enthralled by the nature.
Nerawareta Gakuen must rely on the viewers having some knowledge of the manga or novel because it gets pretty confusing towards the end. There are also aspects that are brought up repeatedly that they do not go into detail about like what happened exactly with a cell phone that made someone quit coming to school and how is telepathy going to help the people live on the moon? Maybe they covered it, but my eyes were too glazed over by how boring this movie is.
The ending is pretty disappointing because there are so many loose ends. Who knows if the future is actually saved or not. What happened with all the psychics that were basically running the school? I am sure they didn’t run away with their tails between their legs because Seki ran off with Natsuki. They had all kinds of support, so what happened? I saw that one of the kids that left school graduated, but how did that come about. The only thing clarified at the end was who was hooking up.
