Let's start from the good things: the setting of the movie, the backgrounds, the colours, the natural phenomena are awesome, well conceived and breathtakingly well executed.
And that's pretty much it.
The character design, for example, is bland: visually, they look like a rip-off of an average TV animation series from the mid '00s (Avatar The Last Airbender, anyone?). They are neither ugly nor beautiful, they are unmemorable; you won't like or even remember any of the supporting characters, and even the protagonists are sort of indistinct.
But then, there's the plot. This is where the movie goes horribly wrong. You see, if even the director thinks that he has to add a panel at the very end with a sign telling you what the story means, it's the sign that the screenwriting had big problems. It took me a day and several cycles of fridge logic to realize that this movie is supposed to be about the cycle of seasons, with Chun representing the spring and Qiu representing the autumn, and so this explains the climax (spoiler ahead) in which Qiu dies to allow Chun to be born again (no winter apparently in China). I don't think I am stupid, and perhaps for Chinese viewers this would be more obvious, but this had totally escaped me and even the panel at the end came out of the blue and immediately went away.
While you watch it, the movie rather seems to be about a rotten love triangle in which Qiu, the strong, beautiful, courageous boy, gets horribly friendzoned again and again by this dumb, hateable girl that makes a stupid thing after another after having fallen for a well built fisherman that she saw only once, but you know, he goes around naked and flexing his muscles, so how not to fall for him? He's the kind of guy that must have a Harley in the backyard. You will end up hating Chun for how she mistreats Qiu, exploiting him again and again to fix all her mistakes until getting him to die for her.
And then, there are the plot devices. Terrible plot devices, badly thought out, unbelievable in the bad sense. Such as the Rat Lady stealing the dolphin flute because it is required to travel to the human world, except that the dolphin flute has already appeared a dozen times without anyone mentioning this, and that the protagonist has already travelled to the human world without it or any other human object. Or the god-girl-turned-dolphin sent by the gods to watch the humans for seven days, except that the vortex to bring her back home is positioned exactly near to a superstrong fishing net that is several kilometers long and that she cannot avoid. Or the fact that when Chun is first shown magically growing begonias, Qiu is shown magically growing an orange; in hindsight, this was trying to hint us at the fact that he represents the autumn, but its only effect when viewing the movie was to make me think that all the kids in the village can magically grow stuff. Or the fact that when Chun's mother inadvertingly throws away the human turned fish, Chun reveals her the truth, but then nothing happens, nobody mentions it again and the mother disappears as a character and reappears only at the end of the movie. Of course, with all these blunders it is almost impossible to understand the story or to build any empathy for what is happening.
In the end, you may think that this is a bad movie. It is not, and for all its faults, it is ok to watch and it will give you some good moments. But please, let's stop mentioning Miyazaki at every promotional occasion; perhaps these people wanted to be Studio Ghibli, but they completely missed one of Miyazaki's great marks - the ability to express complexity in simple ways without losing its depth, and to express deep concepts through immediate emotions. So, if you want to see a really good Chinese animation franchise, go watch Luoxiaohei instead.
And that's pretty much it.
The character design, for example, is bland: visually, they look like a rip-off of an average TV animation series from the mid '00s (Avatar The Last Airbender, anyone?). They are neither ugly nor beautiful, they are unmemorable; you won't like or even remember any of the supporting characters, and even the protagonists are sort of indistinct.
But then, there's the plot. This is where the movie goes horribly wrong. You see, if even the director thinks that he has to add a panel at the very end with a sign telling you what the story means, it's the sign that the screenwriting had big problems. It took me a day and several cycles of fridge logic to realize that this movie is supposed to be about the cycle of seasons, with Chun representing the spring and Qiu representing the autumn, and so this explains the climax (spoiler ahead) in which Qiu dies to allow Chun to be born again (no winter apparently in China). I don't think I am stupid, and perhaps for Chinese viewers this would be more obvious, but this had totally escaped me and even the panel at the end came out of the blue and immediately went away.
While you watch it, the movie rather seems to be about a rotten love triangle in which Qiu, the strong, beautiful, courageous boy, gets horribly friendzoned again and again by this dumb, hateable girl that makes a stupid thing after another after having fallen for a well built fisherman that she saw only once, but you know, he goes around naked and flexing his muscles, so how not to fall for him? He's the kind of guy that must have a Harley in the backyard. You will end up hating Chun for how she mistreats Qiu, exploiting him again and again to fix all her mistakes until getting him to die for her.
And then, there are the plot devices. Terrible plot devices, badly thought out, unbelievable in the bad sense. Such as the Rat Lady stealing the dolphin flute because it is required to travel to the human world, except that the dolphin flute has already appeared a dozen times without anyone mentioning this, and that the protagonist has already travelled to the human world without it or any other human object. Or the god-girl-turned-dolphin sent by the gods to watch the humans for seven days, except that the vortex to bring her back home is positioned exactly near to a superstrong fishing net that is several kilometers long and that she cannot avoid. Or the fact that when Chun is first shown magically growing begonias, Qiu is shown magically growing an orange; in hindsight, this was trying to hint us at the fact that he represents the autumn, but its only effect when viewing the movie was to make me think that all the kids in the village can magically grow stuff. Or the fact that when Chun's mother inadvertingly throws away the human turned fish, Chun reveals her the truth, but then nothing happens, nobody mentions it again and the mother disappears as a character and reappears only at the end of the movie. Of course, with all these blunders it is almost impossible to understand the story or to build any empathy for what is happening.
In the end, you may think that this is a bad movie. It is not, and for all its faults, it is ok to watch and it will give you some good moments. But please, let's stop mentioning Miyazaki at every promotional occasion; perhaps these people wanted to be Studio Ghibli, but they completely missed one of Miyazaki's great marks - the ability to express complexity in simple ways without losing its depth, and to express deep concepts through immediate emotions. So, if you want to see a really good Chinese animation franchise, go watch Luoxiaohei instead.