AKA: DEEMO サクラノオト -あなたの奏でた音が、今も響く- ; Deemo: Sakura no Oto- Anata no Kanadela Oto ga, Ima mo Hibiku (Lit: "Deemo: The Sound of Cherry Blossoms- The Sound You Played Still Echoes", per Wiki)

Genre: Drama, fantasy

Length: Movie, 89 minutes

Distributor: Currently licensed by Eleven Arts, available streaming on tubitv.com and shoutfactorytv.com

Content Rating: PG (Mature situations)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: The Boy and the Heron

Notes: Based on a Taiwanese rhythm game created by Rayark. Directed by Junichi Fujisaku.

Rating:

Deemo: Memorial Keys

Synopsis

An unconscious girl descends into a cathedral-like space occupied by a piano, and by Deemo, a tall, slender, and featureless being (though one with incredibly long fingers.) She's forgotten who she is, but Deemo (who apparently can't speak), and three denizens of this world (who CAN) try to help her recover her name, and her world.

Review

WARNING: There are exactly two spoilers in this review. They shouldn't affect your enjoyment of the movie. Well, I don't THINK they will...

I'll start by saying that the simplistic 3D CG character animation here almost made me call it quits immediately. (Many computer-animated shows at least TRY to look a little more like they're hand-drawn. Not here.) The character motion was particularly poorly done. It's most evident in the girl herself, whose name (SPOILER #1) is actually Alice. (This is revealed fairly early, so I don't feel TOO bad about telling you.)

The other human characters in the film (there are a few) didn't seem quite so distractingly rendered, however; and the backgrounds are very well done, occasionally gorgeous, and often intriguing. (I'd never heard of a "rhythm game" before, by the way.)

It turns out that, perhaps because of Alice's presence, whenever the piano is played, it stimulates the growth of a tree, and the cast figures if the tree gets tall enough, Alice might be able to climb it and exit through the hole in the ceiling that she came in through. However, a white-clad, white-masked girl seems determined to thwart Alice's departure. (The tree, by the way, I thought was very well rendered.)

On Alice's side, besides Deemo, we have three animated toys: a stuffed cat named Mirai, a flying doll named Fragrant Sachet (kind of like Tinkerbell, but much less cute), and a nutcracker (unimaginatively named Nutcracker.) The Nutcracker I found kind of annoying, so maybe didn't deserve an actual name.

Now, Alice's Adventures in Wherever This-Is-Land are confusingly interspersed with segments where she's taking music lessons in an (apparently) all-girls' school, so here's SPOILER #2: the show's events are NOT being shown in chronological order. As with Hal, the show is trying to "fake you out" to keep you from figuring out the whole story too early. But when you DO get the full story, it'll (pretty much) make sense.

Oh, I should mention that the piano pieces we hear in the show match the backgrounds, in a sense- they're pleasant and/or intriguing. I guess they were "Key" to the "rhythm game".

guess I should ALSO warn the viewer that the show's resolution does go the sentimentality route, though I think it stops short of being mawkish. Except for some of the character animation (particularly Alice's), I very much enjoyed this. Not an epic (the story's too spare for that, anyway), but an engaging way to spend an hour and a half or so. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: No MPAA rating. The box suggests PG. There's some sadness near the end, so we'll say Mature Situations.