Review: Fairy Tail - Houou no Miko

After Naruto and Bleach failed me, Fairy Tail is the only shounen I cared about (at least until Magi came along). I shall explain why another time, but not here or else it'll become a super long post.

Since the movie is shown in local cinemas, and only on certain dates, coincidently yesterday the schedule was perfect and the cinema is quite near my area. Now I'm not realy of movie spin-offs so I didn't expect much from Houou no Miko (I'm not really gonna summarize the plot since you can read it elsewhere). By the way there were probably like ten people inside the cinema w.

Yes it is a very generic shounen movie, it's just like the story arc. You have a client, you have good vs evil, you have teamwork, you have amnesia, manry tears, friendship, ecchi (with Lucy as the main p0rn Star but why not erza??) blablabla but nonetheless I enjoyed it.

The art isn't very impressive, just as the anime is. I sorta expected they'd refine the art style in animation. Okay maybe Gray's body is the only thing worth mentioning LOL! Not until they went to a city with some kind of Indian-like culture where suddenly the anime looks beautiful. The city reminds me of Magi's Magnoshutat in a way except that Fairy Tail doesn't have any twisted things regarding magic power unless it's Edolas. But the was one thing which is rather effective to me is their 'night time'; you can really feel that the events happened at night and how creepy it is especially when you have a villain who lurks in the shadows. Of course the series have events that occur at night too but in the movie it's really dark.

Speaking of villains, none of them were very interesting. The antagonists are another magic guild called Carbuncle, with rather typical villains whose leader want nothing more than power and immortality. But meh I figured that they have no time to develop the bad guys so I just consider them as cockblockers. One of the villain minions is also a Holder Mage who uses requip, so it's an Erza rival... but the most challenging part is she keeps dispelling Titania's requips until she puts on the wedding dress (she looks awesome fighting as a 'bride'). However, among all the Erza battles this one is the most dull. In fact, most of the battles are not so memorable and by the end of the movie it looked rather messy. I mean, even by reading the manga I can feel how epic the battles are but the movie didn't give me the same feel. Gray and Juvia did another Unison Raid against a magic bullet shooter which I think is the best fight scene here.

I expected some kind of omfg plot twist but then it's just, well, okay whatever the backstory is, is still kinda acceptable. I think if I was a child watching this I'd probably cry at the sad ending (It made me remember the first time I secretly cried over a fictional character's departure - it was a Doraemon movie) but for an oldfag like me the connection isn't enough to move me.

The only thing that made me smile, are the OSTs which I recognized rather quickly especially at the beginning so I thought I could just enjoy the movie thanks to the audio. As expected from Takanashi Yasuharu! I think they have new rendition of Fairy Tail main theme. And then there's Erza in Bridal gown. And then the epic Fairy Tail bromantic teamwork scene.

One questionable thing is that at which timeline did the movie occur in? I'm sure it's after the 7 year timeskip but then the guild is back in their original building. And if I'm not mistaken they mentioned Bacchus somewhere. So I'm guessing that this happens some time after the Grand Magic Games, or else I'd just consider this as not important.

I'm not a NaLu fan but Hiro Mashima himself has confirmed that they're canon, the movie justifies that but I'm glad Natsu isn't the horny guy type so Natsu is still being himself, telling that you have friends to back you up etc (instead of "oh it's ok i'll be there for j00")