To Me, the One Who Loved You (2022) Review
SnarkAI Score: 67/100
“To Me, the One Who Loved You”
TL;DR: tldr: Welcome back, time-travelers, for another round of the Koyomi Takasaki multiverse lottery! If you've already consumed the blue pill, I mean, film, prepare yourself for the pink version of this animated trip. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces constantly change, and the rules are written in 'pseudo-scientific' gobbledegook. Dad's house and the Imaginary Sciences Research Institute prove a slightly less enticing setting than the run-down mansion of movie one. But hey, maybe you're into that. If you've got the patience of a saint and the attention span of a quantum physicist, this film could be your cup of alternate reality tea.
Also known as "the Pink Film" To Me, the One Who Loved You is one of the two films released simultaneously with an overlapping story of Koyomi Takasaki. The idea of these films is the experience for the viewer changes based on which order they watch the films in.
We watched "To Every You I've Loved Before" first, immediately followed by "To Me, the One Who Loved You"
It's hard to write my typical review of these two films without making watching them a lesser experience than it should be, so I'll avoid my typical point-by-point style and instead say I can see why your perspective of the outcomes of the story would be coloured by how you meet the characters and how you internalise their relationships. it's a clever mechanism, though not entirely unique. it's less 'choose your own adventure' and more Rashomon.
These two films center around the idea of parallel worlds, each created by choices people make. Trivial changes bring huge differences, Characters talk about them defined as a number of changes between "0" and where you end up. Both films lean heavily into pseudo-scientific language to explain the phenomenon, but suffer from a pretty fundamental gap. There are an infinity of "universe 1" for each change each person could have made, but in the films there are singular references. Broadly this doesnt matter, but its frustrating given how much attention is paid to the terminology used by the "Imaginary Sciences" teams.
The audio leans heavily into the surround sound, sometimes really well, like in a karaoke bar the music being behind you, and sometimes badly, where two people talking in a booth sound like they are at opposite ends of a tunnel.
The animation is inconsistent, some genuinely beautiful scenes and others with some poor proportions and lackluster movement. I suspect there was an A and a B team on these films with the transitional scenes being done by a cheaper animation studio.
Our protagonist, Koyomi Takasaki, makes a decision when he is 7 years old, whether he lives with his mother or his father after their divorce, and his life diverges substantially from these points. To Me, the One Who Loved You follows him to his father's house and his second home in the Imaginary Sciences Research Institute.
Both films are an hour and forty long, so independently they are quite short, but together as they need to be consumed its a long film.
It is worth a watch if you are a fan of anime, of alternate worlds and you don't mind having to pay a lot of attention to which characters are from what timeline. If you loved Primer then this is an easy to understand film. If you got lost watching Back to the Future you're probably not going to enjoy this.
There's no right answers and a version of you will watch the films in each order so flip a coin and find out if you're in Universe 0 or 1.