Let me briefly get you up to speed. Spy x Family is an actioncomedy anime/manga about an impossibly skilled spy Loid having to adopt a kid in order to infiltrate a prestigious high class school. The child he adopts Anya is a survivor of an unknown labs experiments experiments that gave her the power to read minds so consequentially Anya knows Loids secret. Anya is ecstatic to be adopted by a spy though in her mind spys are incredibly exciting. In order to not draw suspicions Loid meets and proposes a fake marriage to a woman named Yor. Yor agrees unbeknownst to Loid Yor is an impossibly skilled assassin who needs a family to dodge the governments scrutiny. After Anya does well in her classes Loid and Yor decide to let her adopt a dog and of course the dog turns out to be capable of seeing the future. Anya Loid Yor and even the dog have reasons to keep their professions secret from the rest of the family and so with that premise Spy x Family has so far delivered two seasons season 1 being a twocour affair to immense buzz and both critical and commercial acclaim. So its natural that a highly popular anime would eventually receive a feature film. With any popular anime there typically is a companion film of some kind. These can fall into three main categories recap films Gintama: The Movie Assassination Classroom Movie adaptions of canon material and noncanon movies that effectively serve as their own selfcontained story arcs. Spy x Family falls into the third category: namely a noncanon self contained story arc. Its genuinely exciting to see a series go from a manga to two anime seasons to a video game and now to a movie. Regardless of the movies quality it feels like a rite of passage for a series like this to get a movie. Tatsuya Endo can sleep soundly knowing his series has finally made it. Doubly so knowing that Spy x Family: Code White is as unambitious as it is TRULY meeting the standards of an anime companion movie. Spy x Family: Code White feels like its filling out a checklist trying to hit all the most popular notes of the main series: Anya remarks that something is so exciting WAKU WAKU Yor gets drunk a romantic moment between Yor and Loid is interrupted by a violent slap from an embarrassed Yor Yuri remarks about how much he loves his sister Nightfall gets her anguished and fruitless declaration of love to Loid and Bond predicts a future where Yor cooks a horrible meal. I have to give the directors credit though they did manage to keep the peanut references to a minimum. Its not that these elements are a negative in and of itself but the aggressive prevalence of them especially in the first half definitely lends to a feeling of being phoned in. It feels like it was designed to fill out a Spy x Family themed bingo card its kind of ridiculous. How is everything ELSE though? The answer is mostly good. The story follows the Forger families weekend vacation to a foreign country in order to tastetest and eventually bake a specific foreign desert for the schools principal in order to win a Stella. So right off the bat youre aware that they will not be successful in this goal cant have the movie interrupting canon Somewhere along the line Anya unwittingly gets herself involved with a criminal conspiracy and becomes a target for the bad guys so naturally Yor and Loid have to protect Anya while attempting to foil the enemy plot and all the while keeping their identity a secret from each other. It is truly just another Spy x Family arc. One minor complaint I have is in the form of a question: who is this movie for really? There is an overly long poop joke that is for whatever reason VERY well animated and stylistically different from the rest of the movies animation. Its most similar to Anyas iconic dodgeball throw in Season 1 except its dedicated to a joke that just isnt all that funny and is incredibly juvenile. Which is fine generally speaking. The movie is a family movie for the most part. Except well is it? At the beginning of the movie Yor violently slashes a mans throat and blood dramatically spurts out of his wound as he dies which would suggest this isnt a movie for all ages and then the remaining runtimes violence is mostly bloodless and often nonlethal. At several points in the movie though Anya is in danger of being brutally murdered which to be fair is not ground untouched by Spy x Family but all of this together does put it in an odd place where its both too blatantly uninspired and juvenile for older audiences and too adult for younger audiences. You could make this argument for the series as a whole but I oddly dont have much of a problem with that range in the main series so maybe my issue lies solely with the humor in question being toilet humor. Either way this tonal dissonance isnt going to be a problem for those familiar with the main series which I assume will be everyone watching this with the notably hilarious exception of participants in a recent AMC Film Unseen event that was met with a massive number of walkouts. If you know what youre in for there will be no surprises here. ...and to be clear I mean exactly that. There are no surprises here. If you expect anything out of a Spy x Family arc it will be in this movie. There are extremely well choreographed fights that Yor and Loid participate in as an aside theres one exceptionally well animated Yor fight between her and a masked and armored machine gun wielding mystery man. At one point the mask comes off and dramatically reveals that the man under the mask was...some guy. I adore this. Ive seen it happen in Yakuza too we need more unmaskings that reveal that we dont even know that guy. Nothing more than a confirmation that the guy has facial features. I mean it no surprises to a silly degree. The Loid fights in here are also very fun and well animated fun uses of color as well. Loid and Yor are both comically busted characters and as long as you promise not to give a damn its pretty much purely inoffensive fun. Its hard for me to feel like this movie wasnt a bit of a missed opportunity. Spy x Familys recent run of chapters have shown nothing but reluctance toward the notion of shaking up the series status quo. With the success of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train The First Slam Dunk and the highly anticipated Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc movie I would suggest that adapting canon content may be the most surefire way for a shonen anime film to be successful but considering the lack of meaningful progress in the manga as of the time of writing I can completely understand the decision to go with an original here. Its such a shame that they did so little with it. I feel like Spy x Family has never had particularly engaging antagonists and I feel like Code White wouldve been an excellent opportunity to create anything other than an archetypal bad guy for the Forgers to fight. There was definitely room for something special here but what we got was a respectable throwaway film from Wit Studio and Cloverworks. Its okay. Good job. 55/100