Flavors of youth, excellent anime movie by netflix

Before reading this you need to keep in mind a few things:

1) All the pictures that will be in this article are taken freely from internet, I've done no screenshots because Netflix doesn't allow that (privacy policies and some copyright boring, but useful, stuff)

2) My judgment is, as always, extremely personal, you don't have to see that as the king's words, I'm just telling you my experience so that you can either decide to watch what I'm talking about or not
3) The article may contain spoilers but I'll just write them underlined in order for you to locate them easily.
4) My friend is going to come soon, hopefully, by the end of this week he'll upload his first article ever so if you don't want to miss that subscribe to the site to receive a notification every time we'll upload something!

Enough chit-chat. Let's roll.

Today I'm here to tell you about something that is not entirely different from what I talk about usually.

Flavors of Youth is a short movie that you can find on Netflix it is a co-production between a Chinese animation studio, Haoliners Animation League, and a Japanese one, CoMix Wave Films, there are three directors, two of them Chinese and one is our beloved Yoshitaka Takeuchi (for those of you who don't know him he is the director of  “5 Centimeters per second”, “Garden of words” and, most importantly, “Your name”).

What is this all about? here is the link to the trailer of Flavors of Youth.

The movie is divided in three stories that have in common the comparison between certain aspects of life as they were in the past and nowadays:

 - The first one is about a guy that just moved in Beijing after spending his life in the countryside. He compares nostalgically the noodles he ate during his youth with the ones he has in Beijing, understanding that he is being actually persecuted by the flavours that once were part of his everyday life because noodles were prepaired with more care and love, without the concept of product-consumer in mind.

-The second one is about a really beautiful girl (I'll call her A) and her sister (B).
A decides -following the loss of their parents- to use her incredible beauty alongside her height to become a model, while B designs clothes in her free time.
The plot focuses on the comparison between "today’s" and "yesterday’s"style with a particular stress on models age and attitude.
-The third story is about a random guy which company split apart after he starts studying in a very prestigious university.
According to me the story here revolves around the comparison between our iper-connected modern means of communication and the past ones which were slower but maybe conveyed more feelings?

Let's talk graphics.

There is no way of telling how good this is, it's like an inch far from the top (Studio Ghibli, I really love Hayao Miazaki's movies). When I first saw the movie I thought  it would consist of an hour-ish long talk on noodles and consequently started feeling hungry (see for yourselves|); however the animations are great, characters are beautiful and feel real (except the one in the first story that is too weird, pronounces the words "xia-something-noodles" too many times and, all in all,  looks  to me as if his life is centered around food in a less than credible way…). Overall settings, landscapes, and every non-moving object are hand-drawn in (probably) a nod to Miazaki’s movies. Such details are easy to spot since characters colors appear plainer, brighter and in general they are computer-coloured; it is difficult for me to explain however, you'll notice that difference almost immediately when you see the movie.

Let's talk plot.

The plot is cool but the first story feels really weak to me:

The protagonist is strangely obsessed with noodles. The first 20 minutes are pretty depressing as a whole. The second and third story are much better, well built and solidly standing on their feet;
especially #2, probably the most thought-inducing. As stated above it is centered around fashion and style, the dream-world of many modern girl attracted to it by all the glitter and  zero knowledge of the sacrifices a model has to go through to try and build a career which, at best, will, be steep and very short.
The episode wraps up with a consideration on how ‘beauty won't last forever’.
Nice touch indeed.
Last but not least #3 is a love story that really takes your breath away through clever use of suspense built on the protagonist's idea of attending the same university as his friend (the girl he loves).

Ending

The movie ends with what actually is the first scene of the movie where we see all the characters gathering together without knowing each other (every story is detached from the other),

Very cool! I feel like this is easily one of the best endings I have ever seen in an anime movie: So ‘easy’ and so unexpected!

Bottom line:

If you have Netflix just enter "Flavours of Youth" in the search bar and you're good to go.

Clocking in at 1 hour and 14 minutes makes this an easy choice for those times in which you want to relax but do not have too much time in your hands.  
No Netflix? Head over to animeworld, you might find it there (I don't know for sure because it doesn't work on my browser so I'll skip the research this time).
Either way in my opinion, this movie is totally worth your time.

Hopefully you guys enjoyed this little review. Toss a like/+1/LOL and a comment to tell me whether you watched the movie or not, or even to tell me that I suck at reviewing stuff if so inclined.

Standby for another review on Mob Psycho 100 live action. Sooner or later.

See Nya