I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018)

  

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018)

4/10

Starring the voices of

Mahiro Takasugi

Lynn

Yukiyo Fujii

Yuma Uchida

 

Directed by: Shinichiro Ushijima

 

 

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is manufactured emotion pretending to be profound and I did not feel any of it.
The animation is decent, clean, bright and soft with no headaches like the movie Mind Game which I saw before it, but I feel the voice casting did an average job and there is this failure on their part to capture my attention and make me want to drop everything I am doing to sit and listen. Like Mind Game and a lot of other anime movies, I saw this in Japanese with subtitles so I can watch and not be tempted to skip ahead, but this still failed to capture me.

The movie plot is too straightforward and it does not give me a reason to have a second take, no wait what moment, just me sitting in manufactured chaos and emotions. It is about a quiet boy who reads a girl’s diary and finds out she has a terminal pancreatic illness and they become friends and she teaches him how to live, the formula we have all seen like a thousand times before now.

And because the film starts by showing her funeral, there is no tension and we already know she will die, this is not a spoiler, so with a lack of mystery or emotional bait you know exactly where it is heading.

The one thing I will give this movie is the twist of Sakura getting murdered instead of dying from the illness and I did not see that coming, but I felt they wasted that twist because it could have been a sharp cut that should have caused everything to change and force a new direction. Instead, the movie does not use it that way, it uses that twist to drag the grieving process even longer.

Now we must meet her family and her friend and discover her special gift, and the whole thing turns into grief tourism, structured sadness like the makers are holding a board saying cry here everyone.

Some films use emotion to make you look inward, an example is A Silent Voice which hits you because Shoko’s suicide attempt forces you to question the signs you missed, and Your Name hits you because the timeline twist makes you re-examine everything you thought you were watching, and Look Back hits you because the murder happens fast and sharp and only ten minutes and the film refuses to drown you in grief because it trusts you to feel without being dragged.

This film does the opposite and every emotion is stretched and every moment is designed to instruct you to react.

This movie is wasted potential wrapped in manipulation and that is the biggest problem with it and why I do not recommend you seeing it.