An Attack on Titan director made Netflix’s parkour fantasy Bubble into a true oddity

polygon.com:

Much of the narrative of Netflix’s original anime movie Bubble revolves around a group of radical young people who take part in “Tokyo Battlekour,” a team parkour game of capture-the-flag set amid the submerged ruins of a metropolis. As a post-apocalyptic riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, it’s an outlandish, willfully silly approach to literary adaptation played almost completely straight. Not to be mistaken with Judd Apatow’s immediately forgettable Netflix original The Bubble, Bubble is tender, even meditative. But its best ideas are sadly swept away amid a wave of half-formed ones.

Taking place in a future Tokyo that’s now mostly underwater as the result of a strange “natural” disaster characters call the “bubble fall,” Bubble (directed by Attack on Titan andKabaneri of the Iron Fortress’ Tetsurō Araki) follows an introverted young man named Hibiki as he encounters a mysterious girl, Uta, who may have a connection to that apocalyptic event and the magic floating bubbles left lingering in its wake.

Even in occupying a flooded and abandoned city, Hibiki and his friends and rivals run the risk of being evicted by the authorities — the dogmas of the old world cling to what little remains. Bubble could stand to explore that in a little more depth, especially considering the restorative note of the ending. Instead, it focuses on its fairy-tale retelling, falling back on narrative cliché: A young man, disconnected from the world around him, meets a mysterious young girl who knows nothing about that world, but still pushes him to live in it more fully. (It’s a tale as old as time: a boy meeting and falling in love with a sentient bubble who dresses like a Japanese pop idol.) The classic coming-of-age,