This is a romance drama through and through. Norimichi on the other hand can’t avoid the fact that his friend Yusuke has the biggest crush on Nazuna and would disown him if he found out he took her first.ĭirectors Akiyuki Shinbou and Nobuyuki Takeuchi have made sure to stamp SHAFT trademarks all over this film, but not so many as to make it too abstract for the viewer to comprehend. She knows that she can’t really change her fate, and that she will be leaving town with her mother who is remarrying. When something disastrous happens to them, time rewinds by 20 minutes, and Lola is given another chance to find the money, only by another means.Īs we’ve seen with many many shows and movies dealing with time travel, messing around with time usually leads to bad consequences, and while nothing life-threatening happens to Nazuna and Norimichi, he uses the ball to buy as much time as he can with Nazuna. In that, her finding the money is told in real-time (she has 20 minutes to find the money before the boyfriend does something he regrets and ends up being caught by the police). When her own family comes and finds her just as she’s ready with her suitcase, the boy she likes (Norimichi) decides to take action, and by using the transparent ball she found, he rewinds time by a few hours and creates an alternate reality.Īs I watched each reality being formed, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the 1998 German cult film Run Lola Run, which tells the story of a girl who runs around Berlin to find 100,000 Deutschmarks for her boyfriend who needs to pay back his gangster boss. After finding a transparent ball on the beach, aloof class idol Nazuna decides to run away from home, and take the boy she likes with her. They have built up a lot of respect in the UK anime community in such a short a time and they are also responsible for bringing Your Name, A Silent Voice and Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale to UK screens, among others… I guess I’m just lucky that my local cinema is one of a handful across the country that gets to see it.īased on the 1993 live-action short film of the same name, Fireworks takes place in a seaside town during the local summer festival.

Back then, I didn’t expect it to come to the West as soon as it did, and so I was even more ecstatic to see British anime distributor Anime Limited had picked up the rights here. I had expressed interest in Fireworks around the time it was announced, back in December of last year. Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain that SHAFT will not really mind. Fireworks rolls off the tongue better for the West than its Japanese title ( Uchiage Hanabi, Shita Kara Miru Ka? Yoko Kara Miru Ka?, which translates as ‘Fireworks, Should We See It From The Side Or The Bottom?’).

A silent voice fireworks