With an intro like that, I half-expected the film's opening shot to show the biggest city on the planet engulfed in a silent black dome of pent-up psychic energy. Instead, "Happyend" lights up on a scene that finds its teenage leads sneaking into an underground techno club, and then laughing together with youthful abandon as they flee the cops who'd shut the party down.
By the end of this wistfully well-remembered look at the world to come, however, those very different prologues - one apocalyptic, the other giddily alive - will come to seem like one and the same.
Sora's ultra-realistic characters may not get mixed up with Neo-Tokyo's coolest biker gang or mutate into giant, oozing babies the size of an Olympic sports arena. Still, their bodies are similarly absorbed into the technological crises of their time, and their friendships are similarly challenged by the frustrations of inheriting a future that feels like it's already given up on them.
A year after paying tribute to his late father with "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus," Neo Sora makes his narrative debut with a movie whose title was inspired by one of the most delicate compositions performed in that concert doc.
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