jose-cruz53

Brazilian art is in terrible state and this movie consists in a nice summary of what is wrong with Brazilian art.

The level of intelligence of this movie's writing is of lower than most animated Disney movies: you have the poor "opressed" northeasterns, the evil Americans, and their southesterns dogs. Despite being opressed and poor the northeasterns reveal their inner strength when their lives are at stake and American heads roll (literary).

So what's wrong with the movie? Everything. The movie does not have "characters" but only actors standing in for cardboard cutouts that represents group identities (northeastern Brazilians, Americans, etc). This movie is an example of collectivist ideology where individuals do not exist but are one manifestations of groups, which are "good" or "evil" in nature. The plot is completely inane, but it would still work if the rest of the movie were not so poor ideologically, full of juvenile violence and nudity.

What this movie is, exactly? It is a statement of fascist ideology. Yes, this is a fascist movie. It is fascist becaude it assumes that ethnic identity determines individual behavior and that ethnic groups are fundamentally opposed to each other. This is Mussolini's ideology. It's ironic the movie calls the main villain a Nazi while it is itself in agreement with Nazi ideology: just change the names of the groups (the Germans are the northeastern Brazilians, the Jews are the Americans, the Russians and Americans are the Politicians and Southeastern Brazilians) and the relationships depicted in the movie are in full agreement with Hitler's ideology: "the poor Germans are oppressed by the Jews and their dogs, the Russians and Americans."

It is not unsurprising that Brazil's ("left leaning") artistic class considers themselves the antifacist resistance when they themselves deeply believe in a variant of fascist ideology. It's a fact the Brazilian "left" has always expressed admiration for fascist leaning Getulio Vargas dictator.

So, while this is a well directed and we'll acted movie, because it is drowning itself into a moronic ideology instead of being an actual work of art that consists of genuine individual expression, I cannot give it a rating higher than 3/10.

Imagine if you had something like The Avengers movies but removing all the inconsistencies such as picking up characters from very different fictional worlds, instead, you had a consistent integrated story that made perfect sense inside its universe of magic and technology. In fact, the use of terms such as nanotechnology in fiction is just another way of saying magic and this movie expresses this idea very well.

In terms of plot this movie is the second part of the story that began in Reflection. Every mystery of the first movie is explained and made clear. Torwards the end it gets very emotional, overall, I almost cried watching some scenes.

Yes, it has some issues, mostly relating to its very conventional direction and the transformation sequences go too long for their own good. Howerver, I am not cutting points for this because the movie never tried to be something experimental and indulgence in transformation sequences is Nanoha's franchise defining characteristic.