Fireworks, Should We See It from the Side or the Bottom? – or just Fireworks for short – is a science
fantasy teen drama anime film about a high school boy named Norimichi who
secretly likes his classmate Nazuna.
However, he’s prevented from making a move because his buddy Yusuke also
likes her and intends to confess to her soon.
Meanwhile, Nazuna is deeply unhappy that her family is moving to another
town, and she decides to run away.
Norimichi gets entangled with her plans, and he finds himself being on
the run with her. However, when they get
caught, Norimichi turns to a mysterious marble that Nazuna picked up earlier,
which has the ability to reset time to an earlier moment, giving them another chance
to do things differently.
When I first learned of Fireworks, I was intrigued. I thought it was the next Your Name. However, its lukewarm reception (it’s
currently just 43% in Rotten Tomatoes) made me put off watching it for a long
time. But when I finally got around
watching it, I actually liked it. It’s
no Your Name, certainly, but it’s also
not the failure that I was led to believe.
Far from it. Heck, I can even see
the argument that it’s a masterpiece, and I am warming up to that view. Maybe critics found that its genre-bending
properties completely messed up the narrative, but I thought everything held up
quite well in the end.
This is how I see what happened
in the movie (SPOILERS from here on). First of all, I think that the central plot device, the glass ball with time-warping
powers, isn’t necessarily a conventional time travel machine. It doesn’t just allow its user to travel to a
previous point of a linear timeline.
Rather, when activated, it allows the user to shift to an alternate
universe.
According to the Many-Worlds
Theory, there’s an infinite amount of alternate universes out there, and that
all possible alternate events occur on those universes. Thus, the glass ball sends the user to an
alternate universe where his preferred “what if” scenario occurred. This is primarily displayed by the literal “IF”
written inside the glass ball. This is
also determinable from the different physics of each world that Norimichi
shifts to. An important part of the story
is Norimichi and Yusuke’s circle of friends debating if fireworks remain round
or are flat when they are observed from the side. It seems silly at first, but it’s through
looking at the fireworks that it becomes apparent that Norimichi is jumping
from one alternate world to another, as the fireworks behave differently each
time he “time travels.” Moreover, in the
climax of the story, the glass ball explodes into various shards that made all the
characters see various possible futures, and it’s clear that this gave them the
opportunity to choose their preferred futures – or be sent to an alternate
universe with that future.
Another interpretation I can
think of – which is darker – is that the glass ball is ultimately leading
its user to drown himself/herself in the sea.
It’s hinted at some point that Nazuna’s dad has used the glass ball in
the past, and he drowned in the sea.
Then, in that climax, the glass ball leads the couple to swim in the sea
as well. Could it be they were
ultimately drowned as well? Or, most
probably, it’s a combination of the “alternate universe” theory and “the glass
ball drowns its user” theory – meaning, while their consciousness is transferred
into the bodies of their counterparts in the alternate universe they want to
live on, their bodies in that universe are left as corpses floating face down
in the sea.
Anyway, I could be wrong. But that is how I see Fireworks, and the way that it manages to stimulate my imagination with
its puzzle of a plot makes it so fun and worthwhile for me. It’s through this perspective that I got to deem
it an underrated, enthralling anime film that could possibly even be a masterpiece.
1 comment:
I really liked the anime.
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