If you were unfortunate enough to have sat through my top 5 anime video, you'll know that Clannad was pretty high up there on the list (number one, to be exact). To this day, I still consider it my favorite anime so when I wandered past a "Clannad - Motion Picture" DVD at Hastings, I had to rent it even though I knew it was going to be terrible.

I had no idea just how bad it was going to be. Ah, where to begin?

I suppose I will start with the story. Now, I was ready to give a little bit of leeway considering they were trying to take a crap ton of source material and cram it down to a feature length film. However, they dragged through what I would consider to be the less important part of the story (everything leading up to the Founder's Day festival) and rushed through all the important things such as (SPOILER ALERT) building Tomoya and Nagisa's relationship (I suppose this was explained away by them having the same little dream thing, though the way they met seemed wholly unconvincing), their marriage, Nagisa's death/Ushio's birth, Tomoya's alienation of said child and then at the end of the movie there is a completely unconvincing reunion and the screen cuts to black. (END SPOILERS). Everything that really made the show stand out was pretty much raped over and cast aside.

And speaking of cast, let us talk about how the characters received the shaft. Tomoya, Nagisa and Sunohara, our main protagonists, are mostly the same (a couple things changed here and there that were annoying but I suppose not entirely off-putting). Where the real raping happens is with the supporting cast. Nagisa's parents have been remodeled into a couple of wholly unlikable, hammy characters. Ibuki-sensei's given a 'tude and fighting skills and is inexplicably teaching again. Tomoyo started out as a bullying bitch and Kyou was her yesman crony. Kotomi is given a couple of cameo appearances as the conductor of the school orchestra. Finally, Tomoya's father is given a larger role where he is less of a dead beat (making Tomoya seem like more of a dick in the process). Never once are Ryou, Fuko, Miyazawa, Mei or Misae even mentioned.

Now, I can understand given the amount of time they had to play with not showing the entire harem. But never once mentioning in some fashion Ibuki-sensei's comatose sister and bumping off Ryou and making Kyou an only child just seems odd. I think they could've easily tossed in a single scene with Misae and not have had it be out of place. Why they chose Kotomi for their cameo (and then botched that as well) is just beyond me. But, I will now move away from characters and pick on the visuals.

This movie was made by the same animation studio that brought us Dragon Ball Z.... and it shows. In a moe (moh-eh) show, it's important the your characters look at least somewhat cute. Toei missed the boat on this one. I wouldn't say it looks terrible, but you can tell there was a lot of corner cutting in the animation process both with poorly rendered characters and inexplicable panning still shots. To that last item, they kept doing this panned still thing where they would reset and repeat the pan at a different speed over and over that really got annoying. Almost as annoying as the sliding peole in Speed Racer.....

Finally, I want to pick on the score for the movie. Now, Clannad the game has quite an extensive soundtrack of good music for all the various moods that one is liable to encounter during the scenerio. Kyoto Animation was smart in reusing these tracks for the TV series. Toei, on the other hand, went and rescored the movie, tossing out most all of the established leitmotifs and fucking the entire thing up in the process. Music is supposed to accompany and reinforce the mood of a scene, but this stuff just misses the emotional mark again and again. Have a touching scene where somebody is recounting something kinda sad? Let's play happy, bouncy music! Ugh....

So that's my review of this abomination of a movie. Like I said, being a fan of the show, it was something I at least wanted to check out. One thing that I am glad of is that this was not my introduction to Clannad or I probably would've passed on the series entirely.