January is when movie fans typically find the menu of theatrical offerings a bit thin. Christmas release season is over, and summer blockbusters are months away. But Japanese animation (anime) fans are eating well in January with two theatrical releases.
"Belle" (review here: tiny.cc/oqmkuz) was released to near universal acclaim last week, and in a couple of days anime fans will have a chance to see "Sing a Bit of Harmony." Both films are good, but the latter is more heartfelt.
"Sing a Bit of Harmony" follows a Japanese schoolgirl named Satomi (Risa Mei) who lives in a tech community filled with robots that do everything from trash cleanup and bus driving to farming.
Satomi's entire town is centered around a massive research company her mother works for, often coming home late and relying on her daughter to keep track of food, electricity usage, cleaning, and generally taking care of herself. Despite this, Satomi's mother, Mitsuko (Laila Berzins), is loving and apologizes frequently for working such long hours as she tries to climb the corporate ladder in a male-dominated tech company.
Her latest experiment is an artificial intelligence Mitsuko places into a robot body designed to look like a high school girl. The robot girl is named Shion (Megan Shipman).
Mitsuko enrolls Shion into her daughter's high school with the experiment being whether the artificial intelligence can learn fast enough to blend in among humans without them discovering she's a robot.
The only problem is Satomi has access to Mitsuko's work calendar, and she reads about the experiment and even sees a picture of Shion. So when Shion is introduced to Satomi's class as a regular student, she's stunned to see the robot. Shion doesn't exactly behave as a normal human would, either, immediately walking up to Satomi's desk and asking if she's happy, then singing an entire song without prompt or warning.
Satomi has a small group of friends that include a few high school stereotypes, the computer geek, the cool kid who rides a motorbike to school every day, and another girl secretly crushing on the motorcycle kid. But since this is an anime, the cast wouldn't be complete without at least one wacky addition to the group, and he comes in the form of an overenthusiastic judo fighter named Thunder.
It doesn't take long for Satomi's friends to discover Shion's secret when her programming crashes, and her body freezes, spitting a couple of hard drives out. This happens a few times in the movie, with the group's computer hacker repairing her each time.
Shion makes the story so fun to watch. She's this chaotic girl who does all kinds of wild things with the sole goal of making Satomi happy. Shion sings for Satomi, programs a judo robot to pretend it's attacking students so Satomi has a chance to be a heroine and save her classmates, and does so many other silly things that'll have audiences snickering, if not outright laughing at times.
And all Shion's chaos makes sense in a strange way because she's just an artificial intelligence with the sole command of making Satomi happy. So her actions don't have to be logical. Shion is just following data she picked up while studying Satomi and figuring out what the quiet girl (whom other classmates refer to as "Miss Tattletale") likes.
Thus begins a delicate balance as Satomi begs her friends to keep Shion's secret so her mother's experiment will succeed, and she can advance in the tech company to follow her dreams.
For a robot, Shion demonstrates so much heart and really acts as the soul of the movie while she quests to make Satomi happy and learn what happiness means for herself. When "Sing a Bit of Harmony" finally reveals why Shion is so obsessed with Satomi's happiness, it triggers an emotional revelation on par with some of Pixar's movies.
Shion works her way through the friend group and helps everyone with their own problems, like settling a relationship dispute between the cool kid who secretly worries he'll never find a passion in life and his girlfriend who fears Satomi programmed Shion to steal the cool guy from her. Shion helps Thunder win his first judo match, and everywhere she goes, the artificial intelligence brings joy to Satomi's friends, which slowly adds to her own joy.
"Sing a Bit of Harmony" was animated by Japanese studio J.C. Staff, and the movie is packed with cute character designs and beautiful backgrounds. Satomi's hometown is filled with all kinds of tech structures like futuristic windmills and solar panels rendered in a sleek 3D CG. But everything from the water to the moon and stars is artistically alluring.
The greatest animation, however, comes from Shion's singing, and while that might seem like a small thing, it's actually quite significant. Animating singing is one of the hardest things to make look natural, and Shion's lip sync with the lyrics and every rapid move she makes while dancing look fantastic.
On the topic of Shion's singing, "Sing a Bit of Harmony" has such a killer soundtrack, with hits like "Lead Your Partner," "You've Got Friends," and "Umbrella." They're worth pulling up on Spotify when taking a break from the "Encanto" soundtrack.
"Sing a Bit of Harmony" strikes a heartfelt connection and emotional payoff with laughs and adorable moments to spare. The film plays in theaters on Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with subtitles and an English dub handled by FUNimation.