Flavors of Youth: My thoughts

The last movie I went to see in a cinema was the Joaquin Phoenix starer Joker. It was before the world plunged into the collective darkness of the COVID pandemic and got shut up in their houses. I have watched many movies during quarantine, but I haven’t seen a lot of anime films. I recently watched a Netflix anime feature film called Flavors of Youth, marking it the first anime movie I have watched in 2021. This blog will just be a string of ramblings from my side about what I thought of the film and how I think everyone should see it.

Flavors of Youth is a Japanese anime comprising three stories about different people all taking place in big cities of China. The protagonists are well-sketched characters, living there lives away from their small hometowns and there is this sense of isolation that surrounds them all. The animation is stunning and so realistic that it surprises you. From the bustling streets of big cities, to the old country roads and congested houses, all of it enmeshed to form into a brilliant movie. This movie also comes from the same studio that produced Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 masterpiece, Your Name.

I have noticed that anime movies from CoMix Wave Films have this very realistic approach towards building the visuals and that is something that makes me love their films. This is also the reason why I prefer Shinkai’s films over Miyazaki’s because the former takes a very real-life based approach in his animation. Whereas, Ghibli movies are more magical and fantastical in their animation. If you like stories about real human experiences in the everyday mundane, you should definitely see this. If not for anything else, then at least for the visuals.