So, about the new BeruBara movie in detail. I rushed to watch it, because the visitor present was the above genga copy <333 Pretty amazing, because even the exhibition last summer did not have genga copies in the goods corner (aside from the very expensive ones). In this sense I consider the price of the ticket well spent. It is shrunken to A4 (from B4), so I can even use it in class. Until now I only had a B4 original and several B5/A3 copies, and it isn't convenient to bring those to the uni. Anyway, I hope they will announce the week 3 present soon. I'm not so keen on the Fersen-Antoinette genga next week, but I would get that if the others aren't genga anymore.
This was the good, now onto the bad. It was bad, I was oscillating between cringing and secondhand embarrassment for a good part of the movie. One of the reasons in kind of subjective, but the bigger reasons are objective. First about the subjective: I don't like musicals. I already suspected from the trailer that they might go into that direction, because the theme song screams "musical song™️." That song is so bad too, and it also showcases the typical "let's throw English phrases into the lyrics, because they sound cool" attitude. But the thing is, Berubara takes place in France ^^; Anyway, I guess they might have gone into this direction, because Berubara has been a longstanding success with Takarazuka. Also something I'm not touching with a ten-foot pole. I'm not sure how Takarazuka fans liked the movie, but from an anime perspective, it was weird. This isn't Disney, anime rarely crosses over into musical, and even those instances aren't successful (I don't mean idol series, that's something else). Even this movie isn't actually a full-fledged musical, often it's like image/character songs sung by the cast added for certain reasons. This latter is also questionable, not all of the cast are nice to listen to... (see singer vs. seiyuu made to sing). The opening/theme song resurfaces more than once, and it becomes ridiculous when the uprising Parisians start to sing the same song used to welcome Antoinette in the beginning in a different arrangement. The song inserts are often used to rush through or gloss over things, but I will come back to this later. The symbolism used in some of these scenes is a mess too: art nouveau motifs for a rococo story... or the underwater imagery ^^;;;
Now, about the objective faults. This is not a well-made anime:
Visually, there are some/several money shots, but otherwise the sakuga is a lackluster. They clearly did not have enough money to make it movie quality. The visual style of the manga is old-fashioned, seen as kind of cheesy, and it has its fair share of parodies. It was a question whether the anime can honor this style without turning into its own parody. I don't think it always succeeded, hence my secondhand embarrassment. The musical parts also used a lot of bank shots in the name of "memories," so I guess those were also meant to save money.
The biggest issue is, however, the narrative. You could already see in the trailer that they would cover the whole story. Seeing that Berubara is a 10+ volume long series with 30+ years passing in the story, the movie was... ambitious, to say the least. Unfortunately the movie did not succeed to make it a coherent story. I blame the director too, because even though I think such a approach was bound to fail, it could have been better even among these circumstances.
The movie feels like a summary, or maybe a highlights reel, and I'm afraid it isn't understandable to those who don't know the story beforehand. Quite often the scenes are disjointed without any transition. Many subplots are only visually mentioned, and not even spoken about: the Dubarry issue appears during an image song, the gambling-Polignac-necklace affair during a narration (not mentioned by name), Jeanne does not appear. Rosalie appears in one scene, Bernard as well. Bernard gets named, but you may wonder why, because he does not become important for the plot. Robespierre is a single image too. I think they could have completely erased these, if they were reducing them to these mentions. They kind of feel like sending a message to fans that yeah, we know there's more to the story, but we don't have time to deal with them, so here, have some bullet points. I would have preferred a coherent plot instead... Btw, he noble thief plot is erased, André loses his vision in a different way. Girodelle asking for Oscar's hand seems so out of the blue, like, who were you again? ^^; Fersen is also dropped after they get together with Antoinette (except for a moment mentioned below). It is really bewildering.
As a fan you know what happens in-between, but if you don't know the story, it is difficult to understand the whys and hows. Btw, one of the worst gloss-overs is the Oscar in a dress scene (see above genga). Based on the movie it is already difficult to see where those feeling came from, but when she starts to dance with Fersen it turns into an image song of the four mains, and the unsuspecting viewer has no idea what happened there ^^;;; As mentioned, the musical parts had many repetitions, and with so little time to unfold any plot, they felt a waste of the little available time.
The characters feel very superficial because of rushing through the plot. If you don't know the story, you can only ask why this or that happened. Like, when did Oscar develop feeling for Fersen? And then for André? And so on. There is no show, only tell, and often not even that. Antoinette also loses later character development, and seems to be the selfish queen the French people paint her as. The plot starts to become more coherent after Oscar leaves the court, but even though there is character development for her, most of the political issues that influence her earn barely a mention. So yeah, superficial.
The story ends at the storm of the Bastille (iykyk), and the rest of the history is only narrated in etching style. I would have loved anime style illustrations.
These were the main issues I can remember off the top of my head. I think making a single movie out of this long story was an impossible undertaking to begin with, but it also could have been way better than this. More money for quality animation would have been necessary, also a coherent plot with more nuanced characters.
