You know The Little Mermaid. I know The Little Mermaid. We all know The Little Mermaid. But do you know what it looks like when you add in parkour battles in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo?
From Attack on Titan director Tetsuro Araki and Japanese animation studio Wit Studio comes Netflix's latest sublime anime, Bubble, which puts a more dazzling spin on the disaster-caused apocalypse genre and blends it with Hans Christian Andersen's tragic mertale.
Here's the set-up: Five years ago, the world experienced a "Bubble-fall Phenomenon" in which transparent orbs dropped on every corner of the globe. Soon after their arrival, a massive explosion occurred in Tokyo. While bubbles disappeared elsewhere, they continued to infiltrate the Japanese capital. When they burst, the bubbles flooded the city and people abandoned it.
Then, boys like our protagonist, Hibiki (voiced by Jun Shison), and his crew, The Blue Blazes, started living in the now-prohibited, overgrown, crumbling city — which has a full-on bubble dome around it and a mysterious cloud looming around the destroyed Tokyo Tower. These residents, not content to let the "complex gravity field" around the tower get all the glory, began using the shell of a city for five-on-five Capture the Flag-style parkour battles dubbed "Tokyo Battlekour," competing for daily necessities like fuel, rice, and beer — while dodging bubbles.
You're waiting for the mermaid element, right? Well, through a series of events, Hibiki meets a strange girl (voiced by Riria) who saves him from drowning. As she's seemingly unable to speak, he names her Uta (Japanese for "song"), and chaotically introduces her to the crew, who live on an overgrown Japan Coast Guard ship, the Rieyo. It's here that Uta encounters Andersen's fairy tale The Little Mermaid through the group's resident researcher and Wendy Darling/April O'Neil figure, Makato (voiced by Alice Hirose), and finds parallels with her own existence and newfound relationship to Hibiki. She quite literally assigns him the role of prince, herself the mermaid.
The film is the latest anime to take cues from a well-known fairy tale — Mamoru Hosoda’s celebrated Cannes favourite, Belle, takes cues from the 1756 French fairy tale Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Bubble’s comparison to the Disney version has more than a moment of comparison. There's a scene when Uta rescues Hibiki that has real Eric/Ariel beach-meet vibes, and Uta's tower song could be compared to the tune Ariel constantly sings (and notably trades for voicelessness). If you're looking for further Little Mermaid-inspired animation, of course, try Studio Ghibli's Ponyo.
Visually, Bubble is simply magnificent, with not a frame wasted on anything but pure, iridescent magic in a blend of 2D and 3D. Whether the film is soaring through overgrown cranes, trains, and skyscrapers alongside the parkour battlers or simply observing the flooded city awash with floating bubbles, each moment exudes a sense of wonder and impossibility — not your average mood in a post-apocalyptic context. The bubbles themselves seem to float off the screen into your own space. Even in smaller moments, the animation shines; when Uta breaks the shining yellow yolk on a fried egg during her first meal, it almost oozes and dribbles out of the TV and onto your floor.
Not content with otherworldly prettiness, however, Bubble contains truly spectacular action sequences. Basing an entire movie around parkour could make these fast-moving scenes underwhelming pretty quickly, but the creativity and logic behind Bubble’s sequences are as engaging to watch as every bending fight in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Each scene involving competing teams — friends The Mad Lobsters and The Genki Ninjas, or the dirty-playing villains, The Under Takers — weaves through crumbling skyscrapers and up abandoned train carriages, defying laws of gravity with the utmost conviction.
Music also plays a huge part in Bubble, both diegetically and otherwise. While maestro Hiroyuki Sawano's valiant, romantic score matches the epic grandeur of the post-apocalyptic landscapes and furiously energetic parkour scenes, the same haunting notes play a key role in the narrative.
Bubble’s plot doesn’t really throw many surprises at you if you know the story of The Little Mermaid. And while the film boasts character designs by Death Note co-creator Takeshi Obata, it spends a pretty small amount of time on their development. I would have loved to learn much more about the members of The Blue Blazes and their competitors, and why they decided to move back into an abandoned, flooded Tokyo. While Makato is here for research, and others have found their way to the group, some as young orphans, the most we really get comes from the group's mentor, Shin (Mamoru Miyano), who says, "The world outside of here is just too suffocating for them." They’ve created a reasonably functional family unit within the disaster zone, cooking and sharing meals together, raising chickens, and training for battle. While leader Kai (voiced by Yûki Kaji) tries valiantly to bring the team together, Hibiki broods in his solidarity, deciding instead to spend his time tuning into the sounds of the bubbles, attempting to find answers, and tending his secret garden.
The centre of it all, Uta deserved more valuable room to explore her character outside of mimicking Hibiki, and she’s rendered relatively voiceless throughout the film, finding instead strength in singing the hypnotic notes of the tower or quoting The Little Mermaid verbatim to be part of Hibiki's world. Even Eleven from Stranger Things was allowed to form her own opinions after finding freedom; Leeloo from The Fifth Element knew how to wield a multipass strategically while taking charge of her own destiny.
Nonetheless, Bubble wields a truly original disaster concept, magnificent animation, and a swirling score to adapt a well-known fairy tale, resulting in a dazzling new take on the apocalypse genre that usually resides in a world of blood, mud, and crumbling humanity.
Bubble is now streaming on Netflix.
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