Patema Inverted

2013
7.3| 1h38m| en| More Info
Released: 09 November 2013 Released
Producted By: KADOKAWA
Country: Japan
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://patema.jp/
Synopsis

In an underground world where tunnels extend everywhere, even though they live in dark and confined spaces, people wear protective clothes and lead quiet and enjoyable lives. Patema, a princess in her underground village, loves to explore the tunnels. Her favorite place is a "danger zone" that her village prohibits people from entering. Even though she's scolded, Patema's curiosity can't be held back. No one ever explained what the supposed danger was. On her usual trip to the "danger zone," Patema faces unexpected events. When hidden secrets come to light, the story begins to unfold.

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Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
UnowPriceless hyped garbage
FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
cguldal I had high hopes for Patema Inverted. I set off allowing the plot's main point, that some humans experienced gravity in one direction while others in the opposite all on the same planet, all the artistic license it needed. The Great Change, which is the event that the film starts with, caused this separation among the humans. Not only humans, but their belongings also abide by these strange new physical laws (so my bag would fly off to the sky if I let it, while yours will fall to the ground, let's say). So already the amount of disbelief is rather large at the start. OK, fine. I let it be. I accepted all this as a possibility, no matter how impossible and unexplained. The problem arose when things happened and they were not explored at all. In the beginning, we get a brief explanation of the "horrible experiment" that lead to the Great Change. At the end, after all Patema and Age have gone through, after their immense discovery that the sky and the stars are NOT what they seem, we are left with the same inane description of how things happened. We end where we ended. No mysteries are explained. Nothing develops. Not once do the teenagers tell anyone what they discovered above. It seems very important. It seems that all those people who "fell into the sky," all those "sinners" may be alive? We have no idea what is going on. We have no idea why they go up there and then come back down right away and then never tell anyone about it. We are left clueless. Forget about us, the poor people of Agai are left completely clueless.Beyond the fact that the plot is, um, problematic, emotional development of the characters is underwhelming. We see most development in Patema, while everyone else remains somewhat the same. The "friendship" between Lagos and Age's father is left strangely vague (so vague that at times I wondered if they are trying to hint at a gay relationship!!!) The "villain" is entirely flat with a complete lack of real motive. We never get to understand him, not even that he is pure evil, if he is... At times, the dialog veered into a direction that made me think that some greater meta philosophy was being hinted at, that this was all allegory and such. But no, not really. It was not there, or if it was, it was done so poorly that there was no way to make any heads or tails from it.In the end, I focused on the comical elements in the film. The jealousy Nato feels and his constant grumbling was a relief. And the awkward inverted hugs between Patema and Age, who are 15 or so, was perfect for some chuckles.Sometimes I wonder how you can go wrong with a good idea and great art, but here is a good example. I won't comment on the dialog because I had to watch it dubbed and I am sure it was a tad bit better in Japanese with Japanese voices, but the writing was shallow and, even if you forgive that, it made no sense at times. I kept thinking that something, anything, needs to make sense, and other than the teenage jealousy of Nato, nothing really made much sense.Recommended only for those who love to watch beautiful animated scenes regardless of content.
florin tudorica I was surprised at the scarcity of geometry explanations in the movie- and this was clearly intentional. Some people believed it was all "fuzzy" or "not thought through"- while in fact the picture is entirely coherent, and the authors leave enough clues to put it together- but they simply choose not to explicitly elaborate in the movie. Paradoxically, this basically pulls the movie away from a harder-core SF content, into the soft of the interpersonal relationships- this was probably their intent.This is a typical "hollow earth setup"- of course, this was never Earth, but a space habitat/colony, entirely artificial (don't let the grass fool you, the skeleton is made of metal) - as suggested by the nearby planet with a debris ring orbiting it (possibly a consequence of the same gravitational catastrophe). Agee's world lives on the inner side of this shell, while at the very end the characters punch through the metal shell and reach the true outside surface of this habitat- where the collapsed building are scattered.The "inner sky is in fact a device/factory located at the nucleus of this spherical shell- that serves as a "luminary" for the inner crust world- a central sun. At some point, the two characters flee that surface which was getting warmer and warmer - the sun was switching on in the morning.So the story could be like this: people were inhabiting this colony, on the usual outer side, with normal gravity. At some point, they decided they have to move to the inside of the shell, and use a central "sun" (which clearly had to be built beforehand with this purpose in mind) - but for this you either need rotation ( a la G. O'Neil space settlements) or some reverse gravity. When this happened, the buildings and the people on the outer surface were repelled into the sky- probably for a short while, until the experiment was terminated and the buildings collapsed back onto the ground. The only people that survived were those inside the crust of the colony, in the tunnels. Also, a group of people were permanently inverted - had a"mutation" that would pull them towards the outside of the planet, rather than to the inside. These were Agee's people. This is reminiscent of Christopher Priest's novel "Inverted world" - with the hyperboloidal gravity.So the irony is: the actual "inverted" people are the "puritans" in Agee's city - that is why they fall into the real sky once exposed to the true, outer surface- while the tunnel people are the survivors of the "normal" humans, the ones that could live on the outer surface. Other inversions: Agee's surface is not the real surface ( "the real world" as the picture says), the sky is not real, the sun they see during the day is actually a machine, the stars are the safety lights of this at nighttime, the clouds are the smoke output of the nucleus factory, the people that reverse fall into the sky are actually Agee's people, not the others (which simply fall down)- so all the original expectations are actually inverted at the end: the "normal-looking" folks are actually the mutants, and the underdogs in the tunnels are the "original" = "normal inhabitants". Interesting that the movie did not want to emphasize all these nuances, leaving the conclusions for the spectators -as a SF fan, I am particularly puzzled.
kosmasp Every other summary probably will choose "Upside down", but it does fit perfectly so why shy away from it. It's intelligent cinema that keeps you on your toes (reaching for the ceiling or floor, depending which side you're on). While there are a few things that can be considered cliché, it's not many things that will come with that tag or branding. So no worries there.The animation is something fans of Anime will be used to, people who are used to Pixar and Dreamworks Animation might struggle at first though. But you'll get used to it. And if you let it, you'll like it too. Because it's the idea/story that counts and the movie is winning in that department for sure.
proterozoic I used to be a fan of anime, a huge one too... but the more good live-action movies one sees, the less one is impressed with anime writing, plots and characters. I'm set for life on screaming 15-year-olds, thank you.Then again, once in a while a concept anime comes along that just completely blows your wig off, and Patema Inverted is one of these. The main characters are a pair of 15-year- old... dang it. All right, it's not completely original, and sometimes even bad, like when it has an obnoxiously evil general right out of Gundam Wing for a villain. Fortunately, the central couple are very modest with tears and histrionics, which is all the more impressive considering the terrifying anti-gravity hijinks they go through (a "69" version of Castle in the Sky, to put it in very general terms).The movie opens with the sight of a large city over radio transmissions. The voices begin to talk more quickly, then transition into an outright panic, and then, we see the buildings detach from the ground and fall up into the sky, in ruins. Patema is an adolescent girl born after this tragedy. She lives in an tunnel community deep underground, and likes to explore the "forbidden zone" - an uninhabited area where for some reason, all the EXIT signs are on the floor and railings attach to the ceiling. One day, she finds a colossal vertical shaft and notices that in this shaft, dust motes travel up.She decides to follow the motes and explore, and discovers a world outside, covered in grass and trees, where the sky is visible and the stars shine at night. It's too bad that gravity here is the opposite of hers, and she's basically clinging to the world's ceiling for dear life, with the sky waiting to swallow her as soon as her grip gives out. Then, things get wild.Direction and visual design are superb, and exceedingly creative with the possibilities of inverted gravity, especially when two people - one inverted, one straight - clasp onto one another. In fact, maybe a little too good - there were points where I kept imagining streams of vertigo puke spew out of my face and fly into the clouds. If you're scared of heights, you will sweat more watching this than any horror movie.Did you ever watch Memento and then spend a couple of hours thinking backwards or expecting to forget everything any second? This type of lasting head-job is something I got very strongly watching Patema. Hell, I'm typing this in Notepad right now and automatically wondering how many lines I can write before they come unstuck from the top of the window and crash down.Without further spoilers, I give Patema Inverted the highest possible grade. I only just have one additional complaint: have any of these people ever heard of a rope harness?