To Every You I've Loved Before (僕が愛したすべての君へ) and To Me, The One Who Loved You (君を愛したひとりの僕へ)

To Every You I've Loved Before (僕が愛したすべての君へ) and To Me, The One Who Loved You (君を愛したひとりの僕へ) opened in cinemas across Japan on 7 October 2022. The two movies are based on two novels by the same name, with the same story being told from two perspectives. The two movies themselves uses scenes from each other, and actually, after watching both of them sequentially, I think it could have been possible to actually merge the two stories into a single movie given the overlap.

I had wanted to watch the movies on the day they opened, but it was raining heavily and I ended up catching the movies a day later. I watched them in this sequence.

The core story revolves around the male protagonist Koyomi. It is a story about choices, about parallel dimensions that branch off with every choice. There is a strong sci-fi element to this core story, with jumps to parallel dimensions and even going back in time. But what really struck me after watching both movies is that, there isn't really anything special about this story. I felt like I wasted four hours of my life. Was it touching? Not really. Was the sci-fi elements something new? Not really. How about the animation? Nothing groundbreaking. Music scoring? I have heard better.

I think the size of the audience at the cinema itself was a statement. Given that the novels were published in 2016, you should expect a fan base, right? This movie should have attracted fans of the novels, right? Well, I went to watch the movies today, a Saturday, a day after their launch in Japan. I could count the number of people at each screening. People were walking in and out during the movies. Guess this showed that there was nothing gluing people to their seats.

 

In fact, I think if they had simply merged the two novels into a single movie, it would make the movie more compact, the entire story more understandable, without making people sit through duplicate scenes when they watch the other counterpart movie. Yes, trying to stay true to the original work during adaptation is important, but I have also mentioned that, when doing adaptations, the important thing is to make use of the new medium, rather than trying to blindly reproduce. It takes time to read a novel, and having two separate novels, telling the same core story from two perspectives, with overlaps is fine, because there would be some time between the reading of the two novels. But when you turn them into movies, with people likely to watch them in the same day, not much time has passed from watching the first movie that you need a "refresher" during the second one.

 

And for people who have little exposure to sci-fi, especially the concepts of parallel dimensions and time travel, this set of movies is going to be really really difficult to understand...

 

Bottom line? Watch them if you really need to find a way to kill four hours of your life. But then again, those four hours could be better spent, like watching Violet Evergarden again. 

Spoiler summary:

Summary of To Me, The One Who Loved You (君を愛したひとりの僕へ): I want to marry my half-sister so we decided to travel to a parallel dimension in which our parents did not marry each other. Aka half-sibling incest in another dimension.
Summary of To Every You I've Loved Before (僕が愛したすべての君へ): I got my half-sister killed in that dimension travelling thingy, so I went back in time to start another timeline in which we never met so she would not die. Aka time travel so that I never meet the one I love in order to make sure I don't kill her.

(click on button above to see spoilers)

Oh, and the aspect ratio seems to be 16:9 instead of the wide format usually used in cinematic films. I guess the producers were probably targeting a Blu-ray release in the first place and not really expecting to draw a crowd to the theatres.