I found the view of wars as an instrument to remind us of what it means to be peaceful to be an interesting idea. The concept of Killdre who can't (won't?) become adults were also quite interesting, but I felt they could've done much more with this story.
Throughout the film, the main character repeated that there were no reason to become adults, but what was the real difference between childhood and adulthood? Children and their immaturity come from inexperience. Even if their bodies never grew up, wouldn't their minds continue to grow into an adult? I wish they had explained this more because the Killdre pilots in this movie didn't behave that different compared to adult pilots. To me, it seemed like being children had no real advantages other than better reflexes and lighter weight for the planes.
They did a fine job with the revival problems of Killdre, that they can't escape the war even through death, but I wished they focused more on the subject.
Animation on this was quite disastrous in my opinion. In this day and age, many anime series mix 3D-CGI and traditional cel animation. This style of animation never worked for me, since the hand-drawn cel animation seems like laziness behind 3D backgrounds, especially since there were many 'frozen' frames where a character don't move for about 5 seconds. Such wide gap in animation quality within an anime movie seems unnatural, and I believe the CG technology in Japan has not reached a convincing level in anime yet. Some plane fight scenes were quite cool, but the following cel animation in the base always seemed awkward afterwards.
Truly great animated films in recent years like "Byousoku 5cm" and reputable anime studios like Ghibli and Mad House still use computer graphics only to assist the hand-drawn special effects without using protrusive 3D-CGI in 2-dimensional background or characters. Japanese anime creators need to wait until they have enough budget and technology to match current Pixar films before using CGI in their anime films.
I really liked the character development in this movie, but I believe this film had a lot of space for improvements.
