Starring Yukiyo Fujii, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Shintaro Ohata, Shinya Fukumatsu, Masayuki Kato, Hiroki Yasumoto, Maaya Uchida
Directed by Yasuhiro Yoshiura
This is the first of Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s films that I have seen, and if this film is any indication then he will certainly be a major part of the new era of anime we’re in. Patema Inverted fits neatly in the list of recent family friendly anime films by Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda, and others. In tone and style, Patema Inverted leans more towards Makoto Shinkai. While it certainly cannot match Shinkai’s visuals, it has a fair amount of beautiful images to dazzle the eyes. Yoshiura seems to have picked up the science fiction torch that Shinkai set down after The Place Promised In Our Early Days, and I’m happy to see that it hasn’t been abandoned.
The premise of Patema Inverted is that some science experiment went horribly wrong and reversed gravity for a bunch of people who then fell up into the sky, never to be seen again. However, some of these people managed to survive underground, where they live separated from the rest of humanity. Now a young girl named Patema explores a bit too far astray and winds up in a land where she falls upward towards the sky. There she meets a young boy named Age (not the way I would have chosen to spell his name, but I’m not the translator here), and we run into the age-old concept of two people from opposite worlds falling in love with each other.
The villain’s motivation is a bit unclear, though. He hates the inverts, but he wants to capture and control Patema, rather than eliminate her. At first I thought he just wanted to interrogate her and find out where she came from so he could track them all down. But this doesn’t add up with the events of the film, so I’m not sure what he’s really after. It seems that control is his main goal, but since Patema is his very definition of evil it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep her around.
And Patema Inverted is a pretty fun film. It has a lot of adventure as Age and Patema try to escape the government, both hindered and helped by their opposite gravities. I was a little worried that the gravity gimmick would be overdone, but I think Yoshiura handled it very well. He spent just enough time establishing it and playing with it without falling into the kinds of formulaic predictability that could have become tiresome.
On the whole, I had a great time watching Patema Inverted. It’s got wonder; it’s got beauty; it’s got a cool sci-fi premise. What more do you need? It might not hold up as well for me on a second viewing due to its occasional logic fumbles, but most of that is minor quibbling rather than serious problems with the film. It’s still a lot of fun that’s well worth checking out.