Setting expectations: This review is being written under a subjective lens and mainly enjoyment. The amount of spoilers will be as minimal as possible to none. I dont talk more about the plot points except in spoiler text. If you come to expect opinions from a very critical sense sorry but Im not your guy as we may have different tastes. Ill try my best to explain what are the things that worked for me and what doesnt in this review. Then youll hopefully be able to understand my point of view and maybe come to your own conclusion about what this movie will be like for you. I preface because a lot of people online come to expect reviews to fit a mold of what they want which isnt always realistic. For me I just like to talk about anime I enjoy. And so this review is about such things. Sorry if this aint what youre looking for. Verdict HELLO WORLD is a film released in 2019 by Graphinica studios. Its directed by Tomohiko Itou Sword Art Online ERASED Silver Spoon with a script by Mado Nozaki Babylon Kado. Note the title is in clear reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22HelloWorld22program If youre the type of individual who is not too critical of the media they consume and enjoy many anime this movie is something youll enjoy. This is where you stop in the review. You can now go watch the film and be able to form your own opinion. Feel free to read the rest if youre curious. If youre the type of individual who is critical of the media they consume. I think youll have a bad time with the movie. Those ratings from your peers are correct in the low scores. Still want to continue on? Let me set your expectations. This is a popcornstyle movie where you might as well turn your brain off. Try to group watch this while intoxicated this film could go into the so bad so good territory from how it executes its story. For me I land between both camps personally. I would give this a film a 6.5/10 on my scale. Its between 6 meh and 7 serviceable/entertaining. This scale will differ on yours most likely but this is how I personally felt with it. In the future I plan to show this film when intoxicated with friends and just shitpost on it as a group really. Thats how much I value the plot in general just a piece of entertainment. The rest of this review will now be me discussing my point of view and why I felt like it had that score. Background I remember hearing about this movie via a promotional graphic on reddit before its release. It seemed quite interesting based on its poster but I put it to bed until recently watching it in June 2020. Watched this film blind before going in. If you look at the positive reviews they talk about the complexity of the plot as a good thing and Ive seen a lot of complex/contrived anime. For this film its genuinely not rocket science to piece things together if you were able to pay attention to the things around. I would say Evangelion TV still takes that confusing shit trophy. Confused when watching this film? Look for an explanation via group watch forums or rewatch the film to pick up what you missed. Personally I was able to enjoy myself while watching this but Ive seen dumpster fires before and enjoy the flames. This is one of those films for me. A popcorn flick that is shallow in its story and themes but overall entertaining in the way it presents itself for the right and wrong reasons. Thankfully its not those anime that personally offended me and I was able to have it land in the so bad but yet so good territory. The Review Now the review. Ill be talking about the anime in the following categories: 1 Story / Plot / Characters I really found the story to be shallow. It seems like they mashed up so much other anime/films together into its script that it becomes so laughable. References to Your Name Evangelion Rebuild Inception etc. It never feels original in what it tries to do. Gotta give it props for attempting to mash up a lot of interesting/ambitious concepts but thats about it really for its credit. There were honestly a lot of interesting ideas but it never developed them further unfortunately. The characters are very shallow in nature and while I found the main girl designs to be cute. There wasnt much to establish a more meaningful connection between the characters. This lack of screen time dedicated to the characters harms the story in my opinion. Maybe the characters are meant to be selfinserts but even then the way the story handles its character in its plot it feels honestly amateurish at points. It doesnt help that the amount of time is 1 hour and 30 minutes but it feels like the plot/structure is all over and not cohesive. The pacing at points feels too lagging and it seems like they were running out of time near the end based on how they were executing certain scenes. Also the structure really needed more story fleshed out. Felt so barebones at times. This might be explained in the visuals section. 2 Visuals / Animation Most of this movie is in 3D CGI. If you absolutely hate it I wont blame you. Thankfully its not super offensive like other CGI in anime and its actually done well in certain scenes especially in action. Those scenes were honestly enjoyable and I admired how creative they went with using the CGI in said scenes. Hard to say the visuals were awful it really varied from scene to scene with some of it looking pretty and some of it looking standard. The animating wasnt that bad but off at certain parts I eventually got used to it all. I speculate that they literally ran out of budget by the end. This is because... the idea that 3DCG is inherently cheaper is widespread why would it be used otherwise if its always worse? What that obviously ignores is that CGI studios arent limited to underfunded latenight TV anime like most 2D animation companies and thus get to charge a lot more for their work. Its true that the situation has led to smaller and less capable studios in charge of those cheap anime tasks which is why the best work in TV series usually comes from companies like Samurai Pictures that mainly work in other industries. However industry members have said over and over that the cost is a case by case scenario and if anything tends to lean towards 3DCG being more expensive. Source: https://blog.sakugabooru.com/2016/08/01/embracingthe3dcgmenaceambitiousactiongirlsundpanzerthemovie/ 3 Audio / Soundtrack / Voice Acting The audio design was standard nothing to write home about. Soundtrack was varying in levels of quality for me. There were one or two good tracks and the rest seemed standard to me. Main offense was the jazzy tracks because I feel like it was out of place at points personally plus it sounded sexual in nature with its bass. Voice acting was serviceable and I wasnt able to personally connect or empathize with many except for the adults. They all tried their best with what they were given really. 4 Overall I wasnt super offended by this anime and Ill chalk that up as a win. Some media has been recently offending me with its awful storytelling and so Im glad to have found some entertainment from this movie even if it wasnt intentional at certain moments. To most people I know I think it would be a waste of time if they took a real look at this film while watching. So I say to lower those expectations to just shitposting at the film versus take it seriously. This movie wasnt great but it wasnt super awful as I expected. It was okay with some awful moments that I saw as mere comedy at that point. And for those who genuinely enjoyed this film dont take my words too seriously as its mainly my opinion. Dont let negativity deter your enjoyment. If anything I envy that you were able to enjoy this film a lot because I used to have similar reactions in the past for similar levels of storytelling. Eventually I grew to be selective with certain anime and their storytelling choices. That ends that. Hopefully this review was informative for what this movie can bring to the table. Having a negative review amongst positive reviews should now balance things out. The section below is me talking about spoilers because I want to talk about it. I wouldnt recommend reading it if you havent seen the film before as it may hinder your enjoyment from knowing things you shouldnt ahead of time. Warning: most of it is negative in nature. Spoilertalk