This review is, as per usual, largely spoiler free, but people have different thresholds for this stuff, and what I consider non-spoiler content may be a bit too far for you, so consider this your sole warning if you wanted to go into the movie completely blank, if you still want to know the score and/or get a tl;dr of the review, then you can skip to just after the last line breaker.
Drifting Home is a movie that was just released on Netflix the other day, and in true Netflix fashion, I only happened to come across it by chance on my home feed rather than seeing any trailers or promotional material for it. That meant that I of course went into it mostly blind, with zero real expectations or idea of what kind of story I would be in for, since I didn’t even read the synopsis before letting the Netflix app queue it up. What I got was a movie revolving around a fairly small cast of characters, all children, pretty much just trying to survive and find their way back home after getting unexpectedly stranded in the middle of the sea. A core part of the story, if not the core part of the story, is the relationship that some of these kids have with the past, as they learn how to let things go in order to be able to find happiness in the present.
As a consequence of the rather personal journey that some of the cast experiences, the story feels like one that entirely lives or dies on how much you’re able to connect to its main characters. Natsume and Kousuke are the ones that get the most fleshed out throughout the roughly 2 hour runtime of this movie, with all three of their arcs being tied directly to the apartment building they lived in together as children, and which is itself a physical remnant and reminder of the time that they spent with Yasuji – Kousuke’s grandfather – before he died. While the two have different reactions to their grief, the paths they took prior to the start of the story ultimately led them to the same outcome – a complete inability to move on. Being stranded together forces them into direct confrontation with this fact, and with each other, forming the basis of the interpersonal drama and tension that keeps the movie grounded even as it becomes somewhat more fantastical in its latter portions. In the last act of the movie, they try to take a physical manifestation of their past back home with them, and their failure in that endeavour reflects the message that you can never truly live and be happy in the present if you keep tying yourself to your past memories, even if those memories are happy ones. Not every character here has something to reflect on, though, and a couple of them in particular – while certainly still notable presences in the story – aren’t memorable enough for their names to have even registered in my mind at any point while I was watching. If you don’t care for any of these characters and their arcs in the first 40 minutes or so, though, I don’t personally think there’s going to be much value for you in seeing it through to the end, because there’s not much else going on.
It would probably be a fair criticism to say that the movie drags on a bit longer than it needs to. While I did care for Noppo and Reina, the way things unfolded towards the end felt drawn out just to try to wrap up their arcs in particular when it wasn’t quite necessary, and they had already gotten a reasonable amount of growth and progression. This is an example of a broader pattern that pervades this movie, whether we’re talking about the last act or isolated moments scattered across its run, it builds and rides atop a wave of tension, and seems unable to let itself take off even as the crest of that wave declines. There’s moments that by all rights should be emotionally impactful, but just aren’t, as a consequence of how it keeps trying to go for a 10 on the tension scale over and over again. These kids had their lives at risk so often that when one of them did actually get seriously injured, I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction at all, though it’s definitely worth noting that the way it was animated was uncomfortable enough to watch that I did at least wince. Sticking with the negatives a little longer, the pacing issue also affected the dialogue, insofar as characters ended up circling around the same conversation and conflicts. It wasn’t repetitive enough to be actively annoying, for the most part, but it was tedious at points with Reyna in particular, and with how much the movie seems to want us to remember that Kousuke and Natsume played football together. Speaking of those two characters, though, the subtitles near the start of the movie were a bit confusing because while the voice actors kept referring to Natsume as a she, the subs had a line about her and Kousuke (not) being brothers. This mixup in pronouns doesn’t happen at any other point of the movie, so I have to assume it was just a mistake. Yes, I know that gender and pronouns are not synonymous, but there’s literally just nothing else to work with in the text of the film.
From a technical perspective, Drifting Home is simply phenomenal. The soundtrack is consistently on point, the animation is not only flawless but inventive in its use of 2D and 3D elements, the art makes what should be a bleak and dreary environment still manage to feel immersive, and equal parts wondrous and terrifying as and when the situation demands it. I have absolutely nothing but praise for what the director and animators and everyone else involved in the production managed to pull off in these aspects of the film. What I do have a minor comment on, which is really just a bit of a weird tangent, is the fact that Bryce Papenbrook is the English voice actor for Kousuke. With how recognisable his voice is as Eren Jaeger from Attack on Titan, I thought it would be a major distraction for me when I started watching the movie, but after long enough I actually almost forgot. On the whole, really, I didn’t have high hopes for the English dub, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well literally all of the voice actors did, not a single one of them felt out of place or stilted, and that may have contributed to my enjoyment of the overall work.
Overall, then, this is a movie that – as long as you’re able to resonate with its main characters – is an enjoyable watch, with reflections on grief and personal growth helping to keep its interesting and visually immersive world grounded and engaging for its audience. Even with the issues that stem from its relatively poor pacing and its approach which risks everything on its characters, Drifting Home is probably still worth checking out, and earns a respectable score of 75 out of 100.
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