Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya Movie: Licht - Namae no Nai Shoujo

Huge, HUGE boner for this movie. Oath Under Snow was great, but the lack of Illya and friends left me wanting. Luckily this movie delivers on everything I expected from a Prisma Illya movie, and brings the themes of the story to new heights.

The transformations are better than ever, the fights are amazingly animated, each of our loli heroes get some great moments to shine, and the message at the end resonated deeply within me.
I love how Illya at her core is just like her original Stay Night counterpart in of what she wants to convey (in Heavens Feel specifically), but this series ... lets her express those things in a new way as her own badass shounen protagonist.

What really pushed this to a 10 out of 10 for me was the message I mentioned earlier. No spoilers, but when the mystery around the antagonist finally untangled I was shocked by how much I felt for him, and I think any depressed Otaku who's come this far into this series would probably feel the same.

Basically, if you like this series unironically, you will LOVE this movie.
Thank GOD they didnt let Shirou steal the MC spot. I mean, I knew they wouldn't really do that but still, I got a little scared after the last movie.

I hate to say this because Kaleid for me is at the moment one of my favorite ongoing Type-Moon series, the manga that is, and the arc that the movie adapts is one of my favorite ones , it has so much action, nuance, character development and great visuals there, but the movie lacks almost all of them.

Visually it isn't good, sometimes it looks really good but mostly not, the story and characters are too rushed, and it's sad because Kaleid has solid adaptations overall, they handled Oath Under Snow greatly, mostly because it was an arc with around 10 chapters, this movie adapts ... an arc of essentially double or triple the size of the last one, and you can really feel that after the first minutes of it.

They did handle the last minutes of the movie much better than the first ones, though again, the manga is the better version by far.

As a fan of this series I am very disappointed in it. I'm writing this review because there doesn't seem to be a negative review here as far as I can see.

The story was strong although it cut out some very important parts from the manga, effectively skipping the nuance in the fights and in the characterisation. There are some great parallels in the characters.

The soundtrack sucked, it was mixed poorly and the songs never matched up with the fights. Often times I would find myself questioning why a song was playing. (or a lack of it) I really wouldn't be surprised if the sound ... director was out of a job after this travesty. The ending song was good though.

The fight animations felt excruciatingly lacklustre: zoomed in CG combat is a cardinal sin, random distant zoom outs to the point where you can hardly see the action, wonky framerates in places. There is a LOT of needless CG animated which was awful to look at. They also overused an awful particle effect with lots of moving black particles which didn't look good the first time they used it, let alone the next 30 times. I have literally no idea who thought it was a good idea.

The voice acting was practically the only saving grace of this floundering failure of an adaptation. Some highlights are Kugimiya Rie who kills it as Beatrice; Kadowaki Mai who does a fantastic job as Illya as per usual; and Hanae Natsuki who really managed to share the pain of being Julian.

In conclusion, this movie is heavily carried by its source material and voice actors. Most of the successes can be attributed to its origin manga which is genuinely good; the only thing the adaptation really feels like it added were the voices which is, however, a shallow victory considering the things that were lost. I really wanted it to be better, but alas, it wasn't.