Review for Psychic School Wars - Collector's Edition

Introduction

I usually know something about a title I’m about to review, whether just through idle curiosity when the license is announced, actively streaming the show on a site like Crunchyroll, or listening to (or rather reading) the word of mouth on anime forums. But Psychic School Wars is a title that has passed me by completely, and I had somehow managed to take-in and simultaneously ignore the promotion and blurb that Anime Limited have put into its release. It’s one of those titles that have seen more than its fair share of delays on the way to retail, and I guess I treated it as out of sight, out of mind. I was surprised when the review disc turned up and I learned it was actually a feature film, not a series. I could have sworn Psychic School Wars is the kind of title you give to a series.


A new school year means a new student transferring into Kenji Seki’s middle school, and when Ryoichi Kyogoku makes his entrance, he certainly turns a few heads, especially among the girls. Soon he’s the main topic of gossip. It’s not the kind of gossip that Kenji has to share though. He actually encountered Ryoichi the night before while taking his dog for a walk. He overheard him say something unbelievable, as if it was his first time on planet Earth. But Kenji was wearing headphones at the time. He’s got more immediate problems, as he’s nursing a crush on the class rep Kahori, and he’s typically oblivious to the girl next door, and his childhood friend Natsuki. He should have kept an eye on Ryoichi though, as he’s actually at that school on a mission to take it over. He’s doing this by awakening latent psychic abilities in students, creating a telepathic gestalt (coinciding with a school ban on mobile phones), and pretty soon Kenji is all that’s left to save the school.

Picture

Psychic School Wars gets a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer, and it is an impeccable anime transfer. Certainly I saw no problems in terms of compression or even digital banding. It was just a faithful, pixel perfect recreation of the original source material. Given that this film is such a visual extravaganza, it’s all for the better. Psychic School Wars is a breathtakingly beautiful film, rich in colour, in art design, with gorgeous, fluid animation. This is a vibrant film where the world is presented in hyperreal tones, everything looking more alive and vivid than it would in reality. Skies are bluer, the moon is larger, plants are greener, and flowers are more colourful... Psychic School Wars looks like a Makoto Shinkai movie turned up to eleven. Shinkai has a way of using light and overlaid effects to give his films warmth and depth. Psychic School Wars on the other hand has more lens flare than a J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie!

The images in this review were kindly supplied by All the Anime.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround and 2.0 Stereo English and Japanese. You can watch the English audio with a signs only track, or the Japanese audio with translated English or French subtitles. The audio and subtitles are locked during playback. I went with the Japanese surround, and found it to be a little subdued. Certainly it didn’t make as aggressive use of the surround soundstage as you might have thought, given characters using psychic abilities. I found it to be a pretty much front and centre experience, with a fair amount of ambience to give the film depth. The dialogue is clear throughout, and it looks as if these subtitles were created for a UK audience, not a US one (mobile phones instead of cellphones, and the use of the word ‘worrywart’). I gave the English dub a try long enough to confirm that it exists, but not long enough to form an opinion. The subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos, but the end theme song isn’t translated.

Extras

I only got to see the check disc, so I can’t tell you about the packaging, the DVD that is part of this combo release, or the 40 page artbook. I can tell you that the disc presents its content with an animated menu, there’s a page listing the distributor credits, but there are no extra features on disc.

Conclusion

Psychic School Wars is a devastatingly pretty film. It’s so visually arresting and breathtaking that it distracts from its story. And that is a problem given that this film’s story is so thin and ephemeral. It doesn’t tell it all that well either, leaving more questions than answers at the end, and populating its cast with stock clichéd anime characters that kept hitting all the usual tropes, and giving little of the depth and personality that is needed to engender sympathy in the viewer, to get them to invest. Watching this film, I felt like a clichéd pensioner myself. I wanted there to be someone younger watching it with me so that I could ask them what was happening on screen at any given moment.


It’s been a couple of days now since I watched the film, and the experience has faded so rapidly, that I find that I have very little to say about it. For one thing, Psychic School Wars is a bit of an overstatement, as it’s more of a confrontation than an actual battle for supremacy. Ryoichi is there to take over the school for certain, spoilery reasons that I’ll try to dance around, and he does this through telepathy, converting other students to his cause, awakening latent telepathic abilities in them in turn. This ability to communicate by mental communication is a useful turn of events for many, given that the school has recently banned mobile phones from the classroom. Indeed the new telepathic students take-up and vigorously enforce the ban (even banning teachers from having them) creating a two-tier society in school, those who can communicate by thought, and those who can’t, but support the new ‘elite’ anyway.


This could be an interesting development, except the film chooses not to dwell on it, instead focusing on Kenji Seki and his love triangle travails with the class rep and his next door neighbour. In fact Psychic School Wars avoids the old clichés of disembodied voices, mind melds, constipated brows that are the usual cinematic shorthand suggesting telepathy, and indeed does little to show it at all. We have to take the film’s word for it that the students’ personality changes are down to psychic awakenings, and aren’t just teenage mood shifts.


By the final act of the film, when Kenji realises that something is wrong at school, and that he has to do something about it, we get an infodump of exposition explaining Ryoichi’s motives, Kenji’s background, and why he is the one that can save the day, only it feels as if the film is leaving most of the important stuff out. Certainly I had no idea what that significant event in Kenji and Natsuki’s past, recalled in two different ways in this film, actually meant, but it certainly seems pivotal to the story. My gut feeling was that this film actually left out a little too much of the story, that it had a lot more explaining to do, especially regarding Kenji and his family, to actually make sense. As it is, Psychic School Wars is just a mess. It’s an astoundingly pretty and well-animated mess, the kind of mess that you have to see just to experience the visual excess, but this film isn’t going down as a classic of the medium any time soon.