User Reviews

This is another rare gem. This movie was not made to be overly sentimental or melodramatic. It was not made to display too much details that may be uneasy to watch. The events that were told from the main character's memory, were simply being told as they should, recollecting from memory.

But even despite the lack of creative storytelling techniques, the story itself has abundant amount of details rarely seen in other war-related anime or real life works. It is different because it was about a Japanese family trying to survive war time in Korea. I was impressed that the movie involved characters from both sides of the equation.

Some may compare this movie to Grave of the Fireflies. Though the latter was far more devastating in its take on war, in my opinion The former stood out better in terms of the degree of being realistic, or at least the characters were thinking rationally. I had a problem accepting the stubborn attitude of the main character in GoTF, as it did not make sense for a child to act spoilt in times of war.

There are so many war drama anime out there (Barefoot Gen, Grave of the fireflies and Himeyuki to call a few) that you nearly even can call them cliché, but since everyone that I have seen have big differences in the part they focused, I wouldn't recommend calling them cliché at all. So we got the war dramas that focus on the probably most famous tragedy, the nuclear explosion of Hiroshima (Barefoot Gen), one that focused more on the survival after a bombing without parents (Grave of the fireflies) and so on. In this case, Rail of the Star we got the focus on the, in Korean living Japanese during and after the war, which is a pretty interesting setting. Sadly the movie itself wasnt so interesting basically because it wasn't made that well.

About the story: We got a few main protagonists, but the most screentime I guess was spend on chiko a young girl whos father leads a coal mine in Korean( propably to support the war). Chiko also got a younger sister and a mother. The start of the show focused more on the time during the war and wanted to show the suffering of the Korean and the torture the Japanese inflicted onto them, but since its on the one had a movie for children and on the other hand on the Japanese side the whole "toture" part is limited to a few Japanese kids beating up a Korean kid. So the start was rather showing the kids play to create a emotional connection to the audience, which wasnt made that bad, but aslo not very suprisingly in any way.

Later on we see the end of the war (Korean celebrating) and the gloomy Japanese which know that they should go back to their homeland as soon as possible. It's a typical for such a show to let the Russian military appeal to the audience as the "bad guys" and the Japanese refugees appeal cute (chiko) innocent and "good". For me this representation is pretty naïve but like I said before since that movies target group seemed to be children it's kinda logical to go that way.

The characters itself were a pretty poor part of the anime as well. There wasn't any depth to any of the characters. Chiko was maybe the only one with a bit more depth, but she was just a plain kid, not much to go into anyways. The other characters where shallow, shown with only the typical character interaction between them for such a show.

The art wasn't much outstanding but it wasn't bad. It looks like a children movie with cute characters and it's a bit older as well.

Soundtrack was ordinary, not much to say about it. There were some nice dramaparts followed by fitting music but that's just normal.

So over all this movie isn't very special. The premise was quite interesting but the movie overall was filled with only very few consequences, no mature storytelling and no depth into characters. If you are completely into these war dramas it is watchable, but it's not recommended for getting into these kinds of movies.