Reviewing two animated films at the same time is a little unconventional. At a time when the entertainment industry is starting to grow a rather tiring fascination with Multiverse stories, this is an interesting approach. Let's have two films tied to the idea of Multiverse Theory; the idea is that every individual decision that people make ends up branching off and creating a separate reality where a different choice was made, and have them tell separate stories revolving around the same character. Then we can have those two stories eventually converge into one. In theory, that sounds like a rather ambitious and unique take on the premise. However, while there are certainly a lot of interesting and clever ideas being executed here, a couple of knots form as these films try to interweave together.

A selling point of these films is that you can watch them in either order. I first watched To Every You I've Loved Before and followed up with To Me, The One Who Loved You. For the most part, both tell rather distinct stories. These are essentially love stories focusing on our main character Koyomi and how the trajectory of his life massively changes based on a single choice he makes as a child: when his parents get a divorce, does he choose to live with his mom or does he choose to live with his dad? Even though things like career paths and the people he interacts with are the same, how everything plays out leads this man to experience two very different lives.

The first time I watched To Every You I've Loved Before, it played out more like a classic slice-of-life story. Parallel worlds and jumping from one world to another starts as a unique background element that just happens to revolve around Koyomi. Much time is spent on him growing up rather detached and eventually opening up to other people, including his eventual sweetheart. As the film goes on, there are interesting albeit predictable story beats that lean more into what people would do with technology that would allow them to jump to different parallel worlds. An interesting social question permeates throughout the film about how vastly different our lives can be based on small individual choices. If you stop to think about it, there could be a you out there who is experiencing everything that the current you wants to. Inversely, there's a chance that other versions of you out there might be envious of the circumstances in which you find yourself. Would you go to another world if it meant you could experience something new or see someone you lost just once more? I wish the film did more with this idea instead of just keeping it to a few specific and predictable scenarios, but the love story revolving around Koyomi was strong enough to carry me throughout most of the film… until the final third of it.

In To Every You I've Loved Before, the introduction of parallel worlds and shifting between them is kept relatively simple and easy to digest. There are a lot of scenes throughout both films where characters just sit down and talk a lot about parallel world theory, but the explanations were, for the most part, kept pretty conservative. I like how the film uses straightforward concepts to play with the audience's expectations. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the film hits you with an expansion of its incredibly simple concept with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the face. Suddenly, To Every You I've Loved Before needs to catch us up to speed with everything that is going on in its sister film for the sake of tying the dramatic climaxes together. It is not graceful; it is complicated to the point where I'm still having trouble grasping what exactly was being done even after watching the film multiple times, and worst of all, I feel the film's ending takes us a few steps away from some of its best elements.

To Me, The One Who Loved You is better regarding its explanations and expository scenes, but that also could come down to the fact that the film primarily focuses on the idea of parallel worlds. The film focuses on Koyomi living with his dad and his experiences with his new childhood friend Shiori. While To Every You I've Loved Before focused roughly two-thirds of its time on Koyomi's coming of age and finding love, the final third being backloaded with plot, To Me, The One Who Loved You is the opposite. The film's first third focuses on building that cute childhood romance, while the final two-thirds are far more plot-driven. While To Me, The One Who Loved You doesn't suffer the same issues due to its difference in structure and focus; this film is not without its own problems either. This film has the opposite issue regarding tying itself to the other film, as I found those connections far more understated than they should've been. Even if the exposition is more spread across the entire film here, it doesn't make the concepts that tie into the film's final climax any less complicated to understand. The ending can feel underwhelming without the additional context in To Every You I've Loved Before.

That could be considered a moot point since these films are supposed to be watched together, and connecting the dots is a lot of fun. There are a lot of subtle setups at the beginning of one film that ends up being paid off at the end of another film and vice versa. A sense of satisfaction comes from seeing everything come together, but it must still be done gracefully. This seems like a case where the novelty of watching two films back to back to explore different possibilities came first before there was a plan to tie everything together. It also doesn't help that each film starts off telling very satisfying and interesting stories on its own but drops the ball at different points for the sake of this novelty. In many ways, these films ask for too much when you consider that to get the whole experience, you have to absorb roughly 3 hours' worth of content with fluctuating levels of quality.

It also doesn't help that both films could be more impressive from a production standpoint. I appreciate and respect the fact that both films use slightly different character designs to make them feel more distinguished. But aside from that, nothing in the film's visuals makes this feel like a theatrical film. The music picks up the slack, as I found most of it very effective in setting the mood. The film also makes good use of silence to hammer home a dramatic beat, and there are roughly two insert song montages in each film that are a delight to the ears. I won't talk much about the voice acting since there weren't any stand-out performances, but some were more stilted and monotone than they should've been.

I really wanted to like both of these films more than I did because this sounds like a really interesting idea with a lot of potential on paper. I could see the creators going the extra mile and making multiple films that tie together differently. However, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. These feel like two interesting stories that ended up being eaten up by the novelty of their connecting for an emotional climax. It says a lot when some of my favorite parts of each film were when neither was trying to be companion pieces to the other. Maybe this would've worked better as a three-hour film that weaved back and forth between these two realities? Hard to say, but I wish I could go to the parallel world where that was possible.