3 out of 5

Directed by: Hiroaki Ando

Continuing on almost exactly in the same pluses and minuses as the series, the Kaina film followup is maybe too clearly a second season boiled down into 90ish minutes. On the one hand, it highlights those minuses pretty clearly – the thinly defined anime archetypal characters; the lack of logic in the plotting – but, on the other hand, the brevity makes the more positive fantastical and adventure elements more directly thrilling. I still suspect the Tsutomu Nihei world building would be better in a more cryptical / obliquely arranged manga, but at least when you boil it down to a film, told via Polygon’s pretty impressively expressive CG work, it has a floaty popcorn-flick vibe that works.

Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Star Sage skips some aftermath from our first season: the appearance of the Ascender and destruction of the Builder has allowed for our initially warrings nations to combine as one, with a crew comprised of our leads and some soldiers setting off across the snow sea for the hopefully nation-saving waters of the Great Orbital Spire Tree.

There’s some fantastic stuff here: although Kaina and Ririha and Yaona and Amelothee and Orinoga are all of the aforementioned archetypes, there’s an appreciated lack of sexuality in the show that keeps the banter either somewhat charming or geared toward light explorations of the ecological / capitalist commentary of the series. And the first half of the film is rather pastoral overall, giving things a uniquely calm, contemplative vibe, leading up to our first big set piece, which is a wild and inventive inversion of expectations (and very Nihei-esque).

The flip side of this, again, is that the compression highlights how simplistic the story is, and the characters really aren’t given any reason to grow within that flattened frame. These factors increase with the film’s back half, which introduces what’s essentially a repeat of the first season’s conflict, just in a new villain, also pared down to a very streamlined version of a badguy archetype, .

While more time up front, at sea, and with the antagonist could’ve easily filled out a full season, I do appreciate the writers zeroing in on what, contextually, needed concluding so that the overall Kaina narrative would be “complete,” and the speed-runned / skimmed version of genres and tropes effected in the runtime is thus kind of impressive.

The high-level wishy-washy here: Kaina of the Great Snow Sea exists in a middleground of creator Nihei-isms, inventive and charming but maybe half-hearted as an anime-first creation. The movie doesn’t really add or take away anything from the series, highlighting the peaks and valleys while the story zeroes in on getting things to the finish line.