Mark Reviews Movies: BUBBLE (2022)

Bubble, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 27, 2022

Animation isn't only capable of showing us the seemingly impossible, but it arguably is the medium best accommodating for that. Take the most dynamic sequences of director Tetsurō Araki's Bubble, which imagines the world of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo.

It's not just that parts of the city are in ruins, with collapsed skyscrapers and other structures, covered now in lush, green vegetation and surrounded by flooded streets. We've seen such sights before across various piece of media, but in a movie such as this, we have an added level of appreciation for the work for drawing and coloring these human-made structures and those natural details so that they appear just shy of realistic.

Araki and screenwriter Gen Urobuchi's post-disaster cityscape, though, possesses another dimension of debris and possibility. Here, following an extraterrestrial anomaly involving bubbles from outer space, a large section of Tokyo has been enclosed in a giant bubble. The event that led to this has had another effect: There's a strange gravity field throughout the encased part of the metropolis.

Basically, things hover and float above the sea that was the once the ground, between the buildings, and above what's left of those skyscrapers—rubble rocks and cars and metallic beams, just gliding along some invisible current of out-of-whack physical forces. All of this—the stillness of the impressive backdrops and the spinning, suspended pieces of debris—blends together aesthetically, providing the whole scene with its own, unique sense of believability.

We haven't even arrived at the action in this movie, which raises this world to yet another level, a deeper layer, and a third dimension. While the city has been closed off to people (The rest of the world, apparently, goes on as if nothing has happened), it still has visitors and citizens—mostly kids, teens, some rebellious adults, and a curious scientist or two. Most of its current occupants are orphans of the disaster or simply outsiders, who see the potential for complete freedom in a place without rules or interfering adults. They survive in various gangs, of sorts, living in makeshift homes, such an abandoned Coast Guard ship that's docked among the buildings, and gathering supplies to survive.

The big thing, though, is a regular competition between those gangs or teams of survivors. They play a game of Capture the Flag, and the winning team gets to choose some ration or supply from the losing one. The players, by the way, are experts in parkour.

Here, then, Araki and his team of animators take on these breathless and breathtaking sequences of characters running around, jumping across, flipping over, and careening through rooftops, gaps, obstacles, and the jagged pieces of collapsed structures. At times, they seem to defy death and gravity (since it's less of an issue in this place), as they hop atop and leap between those floating rocks and cars hovering above the sea that was once the street. Araki's camera doesn't just watch from a distance. It tracks these free-runners, moving with reckless speed and other uncaring but precise motions.

When the movie is in motion like this, it's quite staggering. Unfortunately, there's a lot more to this movie that isn't.

The story, of course, involves one of those gangs and its most talented free-runner: a quiet and moody teenage boy named Hibiki (voice of Jun Shison), who wears ear protection on account of a lifelong auditory sensitivity. While exploring ground zero of the disaster that resulted in this destruction, Hibiki falls into the water and is rescued by Uta (voice of Riria), whose original form is one of the alien bubbles that rained down on Tokyo years ago. She transforms into a teenage girl, makes herself at home among the team, and doesn't hide her crush on Hibiki, who recalls the song she sings as the one he heard before a giant explosion destroyed so much and killed so many.

All of this is, well, far less convincing, engaging, and considered than the filmmakers' visual artistry. Urobuchi's screenplay makes a direct connection between Uta and Hans Christian Anderson's famous story about a mermaid, and that, apparently, is enough characterization for the most important character in this story, whose existence connects this world with the cause of it being this way (She, at least, has more to do than the only woman in this story, a scientist named Makoto, who is voiced by Alice Hirose, serves as an object of attraction to a couple of the teammates, and is kidnapped for a big showdown at one point).

The rest of the world-building is incomplete, such as the fact that these teams are apparently famous to the outside world (The other teammates barely figure into this, except to free-run and rally together for the climax), or half-baked. The latter can be said of the entire back story of the bubbles—not to mention most of the third act, in which how Uta tries to stop another apocalyptic event and Hibiki discovers he might have accidentally caused the first round of devastation.

In a way, none of that matters for a while, since Bubble uses the plot mostly as an excuse to show us the wondrous sights and vibrant action the filmmakers have crafted. When the plot does come to matter, though, it's an incomprehensible mess that distracts too much from what works here.

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