I seriously don't think that this movie deserves an overall rating of 8/10 (average), compared to the movie which in terms of storyline and theory it would have been going for in my opinion, the Butterfly Effect. Though keep in mind, this is coming from someone who expects a lot out of movies that are acclaimed... (an 8/10 on IMDb is decent, though Butterfly Effect has ~100k votes as opposed to around 4-5k votes on this movie) Sure, the movie has great eye candy and is nicely animated. But the characters are deliberately made to be very dim-witted and it's obvious to someone like myself, or someone who's mature enough to tell. The way the characters are so flawed (seemingly deliberately, just to fill a plot that can't fill itself if you know what I mean) remind me so much of how characters from like, 7th Heaven (the American TV show with a bajillion adopted kids in a family). I feel that this is a way for writers to cut corners -- just give the movie some sort of scaffolding just to give the animators something to animate. <br /><br />I can go on and on about the things that really bugged me about the storyline, the characters... lots of the dialogue felt way too much like extremely artificial, meaningless filler to me. The way Makoto was thinking after Chiaki made his confession was very irrational and stupid... and she never really sat down to think and just leaped through time whenever she felt like it, even if in the end she leaped for Chiaki... it just feels like the characters never learned anything fundamental. even after exploring that aspect, there are many other issues brought up that makes this movie so incredibly incomplete as a story -- deliberately vague just to desperately fill up a storyline, like cheating on a long term paper in order to make your essay an extra page long by increasing the font size of the period at the end of a paragraph or something. <br /><br />Very nice animation, but very disappointing story... I only watched this movie because a friend asked me to. Lately I've been kind of avoiding anime because I expect way too much out of story lines, dialogues, character development and just... everything that makes you think and question. <br /><br />if makoto made an entry on fmylife.com during the middle of the movie, I feel that most people would have voted "you totally deserved it." if most people voted "I agree, your life sucks" then it probably would have been because of her aunt who just never told her the right stuff (again, just for the sake of driving the storyline someplace...) <br /><br />Good for a younger age group and eye-candy or if you want to just sit back and not think too much -- don't watch it if you expect something remotely profound, witty, smart or innovative out of the storyline.