“Clayface” Does Not Save a Cat
This feels like the creative team wanted to make a body horror film, but the studio wanted to make another generic blockbuster.

High school girls who were performing a love charm accidentally summon an evil spirit. Rie, a first-year student at a certain high school, harbors a secret crush on her art teacher, Sawada. However, Sawada is very popular among female students, and the shy Rie cannot confess her feelings directly. One day, Tomoko, Rie's close friend who knows about her one-sided love, suggests they try a charm to make her love come true. With classmates Etsuko and Asami joining in, the ritual is conducted, but Asami’s prank causes it to fail. Since that day, ominous events begin to occur around Rie...
This feels like the creative team wanted to make a body horror film, but the studio wanted to make another generic blockbuster.
If the message here is that without a support system, grieving people turn into monsters, it’s not really well-delivered and may be flawed as a message itself.
What seems like such a simple story of survival is so much more than that—it’s a story of family, and of war, and of destruction. It’s painful to watch, but not in a bad way. It makes its audience reflect on their own actions, and in how they are complicit in the sufferings of others as the adults in this film are. Grave of the Fireflies does not hold back from being heartbreaking, and it shouldn’t. It tells a message that needs to be heard decades after the war, and a story that cannot be forgotten by history.
There is a lot of controversy around Q-force. It’s certainly not hard to see why—the series is quite hyperbolic. I will say, that was the first aspect I noticed on my initial watch. Right from the get-go Q-Force barrages you with gay joke after gay joke. This is hit or miss throughout the series.
What makes the lighting in Casablanca even more impressive is how it reflects the emotional states of the characters without needing explicit dialogue.