An excellent anime and genuinely surprised. A story of two different worlds that come together in a surprising manner, you really do get invested in Kumatetsu and Kyuta, and beautiful visuals. This is a rare anime but a proper one.

Saw this anime feature at Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam. Really liked it, went together with some non-anime lovers, and they all enjoyed it for the most part. So I can really recommend it, wether you're into anime or not.

// EDIT (2.5 years later): Their biggest complaint was that the ending was like... unrealistic by the way. OK, the whole movie is far from realistic (talking animals anyone?), but you know, like one moment shit _really_ hits the fan, and the next second everything is great again and the protagonist wins the battle. Like that.

Another good movie from Hosoda but it needed to be longer. Certain aspects are left aside making it feel incomplete and slightly disjointed at times.

Simple plot but great animation & imaginary world to enjoy it through

Pretty underwhelming experience. Generic characters and plot, the best part are some likable character traits and the resulting charming moments.
I expected far more and better.

It came out better than a I thought it would be. I'm already familiar with Mamoru Hosoda's films after seeing **Summer Wars** (2009). And it definitely has that style; a world with a mixture of humans and so called "beasts"/bakemono (or anthropomorphic creatures, animals with human characteristics) which is a theme that goes across all his films. This one is basically about a boy getting acquainted with a father-like figure which happens to be a beast. They enter the different world where beasts dwell kinda similar to how Harry Potter steps into the wizardry world or **Where The Wild Things Are**. Somewhere in there I'm reminded of the Hudson fighting game for PlayStation called **Bloody Roars**, **Tokyo Godfathers**, and a bit of **Scott Pilgrim** with the sword of heart thing. Now that I think about it, it also rings a similar bell with the recent **KUBO And The Two Strings** (2016) too.

Good movie.
Enjoyable and relatable.

This made my evening better, this was so good and heartwarming.