'Fireworks' Could Possibly Be an Anime Masterpiece

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.