Director – Tetsuro Araki, Screenplay – Renjo Ohki, Naoko Sato & Gen Urobuchi, Producer – Genki Kawamura, Music – Hiroyuki Sawano, Animation Director – Satoshi Kadokawa, Visual Effects Supervisor – Michiya Kato, Art Direction – Sunichiro Yoshihara. Production Company – Story Inc./Wit Studio.
The world has experienced what has been called the Bubble Fall Phenomenon where strange bubbles have fallen from the sky everywhere. These then coalesced to create a giant dome over Tokyo, while flooding the city. The residents have fled but a few defiant teenagers have stayed inside the bubble. Among themselves, the teens have formed into two groups, the Blue Blazes and the Morticians, who compete in the Tokyo Battlekour, a parkour race across the ruined buildings. The top contender in these is Hibiki who has mastered the art of bouncing off the energy bubbles in the air. He believes he can hear the song coming from the bubbles’ source point above and seeks to climb to it, only to fall down into the water. One energy bubble follows him down and forms into a girl who rescues him. Hibiki brings the girl back to the Blue Blazes’ headquarters in an abandoned coast guard ship where she proves unworldwise and innocent. Hibiki gives her the name Uta because of her song and she forms an emotional attachment to him. Through this, he realises that Uta comes from the other side of the portal from where the bubbles originate.
Bubble was an Anime feature film from Tetsuro Araki, a director who had previously mostly worked on the various Attack on Titan tv series and OVA. Bubble should not be confused with Judd Apatow’s live-action Covid quarantine comedy The Bubble (2022), which came out the same year.
The premise of Bubble – “After bubbles that broke the laws of gravity rained down upon the world. Cut off from the outside world, Tokyo has become a playground for a group of young people who have lost their families.” – appealed to me. I was immediately reminded of the fine Stephen King novel Under the Dome (2009) made into a decidedly inferior tv series Under the Dome (2013-5). Unlike King’s work, the bubble here appears permeable – those inside are rebels who choose to be there while everybody else has elected to leave. In anime, you could also point to the Beyond episode of The Animatrix (2003) featuring teens playing in a borderland zone where the rules of physics have broken down.
The film opens with a dazzling 3D animated sequence following the kids on a parkour chase through the ruined city with the camera sweeping and diving along with them as they hop between buildings, conduct mid-air flips and the likes. The depiction of the ruins of the city – half-collapsed buildings, whirlpools, trains being swept away underwater – comes with considerable beauty. It is a highly promising opening for the film.
And then comes the introduction of Uta, an Outsider of unknown origin, and her relationship with the closed-off Hibiki. She is accompanied by a strange metaphor that likens her to the title character of The Little Mermaid (1837) – the Hans Christian Andersen original rather than the Disney version. She, along with most of the characters, fall into being characters with large oversized eyes that used to be an anime standard (although has been abandoned in more recent years for more anthropomorphically realistic characters).
On the other hand, it soon becomes apparent that having created the strange world inside the bubble up that the film is less interested in exploring it than it is in its characters and their interactions. In fact, stripped down to its basics, Bubble is no more than a standard Sports Film with the kids as a typical group of outsiders who stand little chance in the big All or Nothing competition up against the stronger rival team. Much of the film hangs on these dramatics.
The film ends with the type of transcendental apotheosis that features in many anime films – see the likes of Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind/Warriors of the Wind (1984), Akira (1988), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001). This offers some lovely animation and a sad ending that reaffirms essentially an atheist view of life – that we are all just energy in the universe. But what you end up wishing for far more is some kind of explanation for what the bubbles and who Uta and her kind are.
Trailer here