Anime 14407 Persona 3 The Movie 1 Spring Of Birth Reviews Filter Check 3

This is my first time writing a review so I do apologise if I get some things wrong or forget some things.

Now for the actual review. I'll just write this at the start. Unless you've played the game, this movie is not worth it. My reasons are below.

To be honest, I'm probably a big persona fan. Persona 3 was the first game i played in the series and i liked it so much i played it and then directly after that I played it again just because I liked it so much. You can thus imagine my excitement and glee when i found out that ... Persona 3 had a movie as well. I decided to watch this movie with a friend in hopes of getting him to play the game as well. Boy was I wrong. I'll go through the good bits first.

Art (8). The animation and character design was very well done. The fight scenes were fluid and the characters movement didn't jar with the background at all or feel unnatural. The backgrounds were just as good as it helped create the ambiance that the world wanted to created very well. Apart from that, there's not much else to be said apart from that everything looks very pretty.

Music (8). I've always been a fan of pop and the way Persona 3 mixed jazz and pop was interesting and it's one of the things i find most unique about Persona. The music gave a very cool and chilled feeling that I've come to know and love while the battle music was very upbeat and suave. I'm sure my decision on this was clouded by the fact that I enjoyed the game music as well and given that the music used in the game and the movie was about the same, I would naturally not have a problem with the music here.

Characters (5). Right off the bat, the main character (MC) was very emotionless. I know that it's never easy when there's a transition between a playable game character and any animation they're in but Persona 4 the Animation did a much better job at this by making the MC then much more relate-able from his sense of humour to his weaknesses. It wouldn't be an exaggeration here to say that the MC in the movie feels like a dead fish or more like a puppet with a very bad puppeteer.He barely says anything giving him a very blank persona (pun intended) and even the decisions he makes remind me more of what a machine would say than an actual person.

Enjoyment (3). If I had watched this alone going into the movie as a persona fan, I would have enjoyed it much more. However I went into this movie with a clean slate and my friend and i sat there for what felt like a 3 hour movie when it was only an hour forty. My friend kept yawning and I struggled to keep my eyes open. At the end of it, both my friend and I felt a sense of relief when the credits started rolling.

Overall (4). I'm normally a person that would be more unwilling to give a high score but would think twice before rating an anime below (5). This movie is no way to get introduced into the world of Persona 3. The most you'll get out of it is that this game is boring and the guys that like are just avid fan-boys of the franchise. If you do want to watch the movie, I cannot recommend enough that you play the game on psp (it has an english release) before you watch the movie.

If I were to rate this from a person that has played the game though, I'd probably give it a solid 8 but from a new persons point of view, it would have to be 4. There were many other ways that this movie could have been improved giving the MC more personality to maybe focusing a bit more on the social links and how they actually come into play. Overall, not a good way to enter the Persona 3 universe and since i can't add it in anywhere (MITSURU-SENPAI FTW!!!)

Probably the most disappointing anime i've ever seen. There are a lot of great shots here, the art is nice and there are some really well put together scenes. Makoto's awakening and the first run through of Tartarus being good examples. I also love the characterisation of the Makoto. He's still a pretty silent mc but they found a way to make it work unlike P5A, turning him this anti-social edge-lord that fits P3's darker tone.

However the pacing is off which kills a lot of enjoyment for me. Too much stuff happens too quickly and we don't get to spend nearly enough time getting to ... know the characters.
The calendar is a terrible example of adapting gameplay elements. It messes with the flow of the film leading to a bunch of disjointed events rather than flowing scenes. A shame considering how cool the source material is and how how much potential some parts of the movie show.

;(

This presents the world the story will be set in... and that's it. No character development, not even presentation. No plot. No nothing. It's just some scenes put one after the other. Not even good scenes either.

The world the story (which doesn't exist in this movie) will be set in, is one with a 'pocket' of time (reminiscent of tales from the fairy, I would guess), and with some gifted youths that are able to use the 'persona', which it's a reminiscent of avatars (like in some ancient indian or egyptian mythologies). That was the only interesting aspect of this waste of time.

P.S.: Be careful ... with the translation too: it can turn this bland piece of waste into one even duller.

First of all I want to point out that I played the video games before see the film.

This adaptation is very poor for me. The background of persona is interesting and the universe very powerfull in the game but on the screen one feels absolutely nothing. The animation is pathetic with many fixed-time moments and one feels too much the fact that the story is taken from the video game without adapting to the format. For example scenes in the velvet room or the calendar indicating which day is.
To this is added an OST of elevator which totally prevented me from entering the film.


Very disappointed