Lost in Starlight (2025)

It's beautiful and kind of boring.

Neither of these stories are new. Boy not living up to his potential until he meets a quirky girl who inspires him to reclaim lost joy. Girl wants to go on epic voyage one of her parents died attempting, but has to leave her partner to do it. That these two stories are pancaked together is in service to neither.

This isn't bad. It's certainly beautifully animated, works as good speculative sci-fi and the design is great. It's inoffensive, cute, at times. However...I often found myself bored; for a movie which is relatively skimpy on plot, these are pretty one note characters that float through relationship-building scenes. We never fully get what Jay's whole deal is, or why he's so incredibly taken with Nan- Yeong. She's basically neglected Mommy-Issues in a semi-traumatized overachiever. She wants to go to Mars, he...doesn't really have an opinion until she gets the job and doesn't tell him? Then he's mad, but it's repaired for them to do the long distance thing. Their romance falls flat; not that Jay doesn't seem like a nice guy, but they just seemed to have floated into this relationship. In fact, the movie is so unconvinced of their attraction that they had to throw in the 'met before' trope by having Nan-Yeoung be absolutely obsessed with a song Jay posted then deleted years ago- anonymously, of course.

The movie has a feelings and conventions of a Rom-Com, except when it remembers it's supposed to be Sci Fi. Then it interrupts itself with little episodes which are memories, or maybe hallucinations. While I first I thought it had something to do with space/time and a SciFi concept, I think it just ended up being an Edgy Introspection moment, which is in keeping with the handling of the climax, but felt a little like someone telling you they are deep, rather than showing it in any way.

Over all, inoffensive, pretty, but bland.

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Highly Recommended Gem!

I initially watched this film solely for Kim Taeri and didn't have any high expectations. I was genuinely blown away by the beautiful visuals and found it unexpectedly emotional. The OST is great too.

There's been some online criticism saying that Kim Taeri and Hong Kyung weren't as good as professional voice actors. I think that this is unfair because a lot of their recording was pre-scored before any animation was done, which was a tough job. I watched the same scene (Nan-Young's video for Jay) with Korean, English and Japanese audio to compare, and found that Kim Taeri has the nicest voice and gave a more emotional performance.

I really enjoyed the movie and have rewatched it several times. 😊

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