Let's be real. Writing a movie is HARD. When you only have about an hour and a half to fit in an entire plot and character development, quite a few details get lost or sacrificed and the final product feels more like a Cliff notes version of the original idea.
Ni No Kuni is a beautifully animated film with several feel good moments in it. You get a sense of the studio Ghibli influences here and the idea that, if given another hour, the movie would have been far better than it ended up as. The film is run amok by plot holes character development that doesn't ever really set itself up particularly well or get much pay off. The story itself is a standalone feature that shares the name of the games more than anything (similar to how Final Fantasy is a series but none of the games are actually connected.)
In the story, the more quiet, overshadowed paraplegic main character Yu and his best friend, the cool, boisterous and athletic Haru are both in love with their mutual friend Kotona whom Haru is dating, leaving Yu feeling jealous in more ways than one. For seemingly no other reason than to move the plot along, Kotona is chased down and stabbed by a supernatural masked man, This sets into motion a series of events that cause Yu and Haru to be magically teleported to Ni No Kuni (Another World) where they discover that the princess of the kingdom, Astrid, looks exactly like Kotona and is also dying. It's never really explained well, but Ni No Kuni is essentially a mirror world of ours where everyone in the real world has a counterpart that they are inherently linked to. There is some brief mention of "the rules" of that link but you're honestly left wondering if it's true or not as random and very specific tidbits get dropped about the connection between the two worlds but no one ever explicitly confirms anything as it's mostly a legend. Also, Yu can walk in Ni No Kuni and both he and Haru are apparently really amazing swordsman.
As the story progresses and Yu manages to save the princess' life, they're set up by the bad guy of the story who easily manages to convince the King that they're assassins sent by a dark group called the Black Banners. Yu conveniently theorizes that they can jump between worlds by putting their lives in danger and learn how to cross between the two. As it turns out, saving Princess Astrid causes Kotona to develop of malignant tumor that will kill her in a few months. This causes Haru to go rogue and he plans to jump back to Ni No Kuni and kill Astrid in order to save Kotona, again all based on theories with no solid evidence that's ever really confirmed. Haru joins up with Black Banner and attacks the kingdom. What could have been a perfect chance for Yu to come to terms with his jealousy of Haru and confront his friend about it ends up mostly a lackluster swordfight between the friends where they end up back in the real world as they're just about to stab one another. Yu pleads with Haru to stop the attack, but Haru is resolved to kill Astrid no matter what. In a bizarre twist, the masked man from the beginning of the film attacks Yu's sister who's counterpart in Ni No Kuni was about to be killed by enemy soldiers. Yu and Haru arrive in time to stop him and he turns into a giant spider and gives chase. No explanation as to who or what the masked man was, but he ultimately fails and the two wind up back in Ni No Kuni having figured out who the mastermind of the attack is.
Turns out it was the court magician who is also secretly the leader of Black Banner, but ALSO secretly the king's older brother who was sold to a rival kingdom when he was a child and then that kingdom was utterly destroyed by his father years later AFTER the crown prince had married and had a family. The prince was brought back to life through alchemy by combining the bodies of demons. Who brought the prince back and why? We'll never know. I felt extremely sympathetic toward him, but I didn't buy into him saying that he wasn't driven by revenge. The bad guy has been wanting to steal the princesses magic power to add to his own and essentially become a god in order to create a new kingdom. Yu is mortally wounded trying to save Astrid and is visited by an old man he met in the hospital as a child who talked about Ni No Kuni a lot. The old man I guess is the caretaker of a legendary sword called the Mornstar and he hands it to Yu as the new successor. Yu hypnotizes a giant bird and they have a fight in the sky and Haru ends up grabbing the sword and shoving it into the bad guy's skull, killing him. A portal opens and Astrid tells them that they have to go because it's fatal for people not of Ni No Kuni to stay there for long. How the hell did she know this? Where are these rules written down?? Part way through the portal Yu lets go and decides to go back to Ni No Kuni. Haru wakes up in the hospital having been in a coma for a month. Kotona had a successful surgery and the tumor was removed but the memories of Yu begin to fade away from everyone but Haru who realizes that Yu was actually his Ni No Kuni counterpart. It was explained in passing that Haru met Yu the day he was nearly killed by a junkyard dog and that Yu said he was in a plane crash as a baby and was the only survivor. Haru "theorizes" that Yu ended up in his world to save him because, "that's just the kind of person he is", and that it made sense that he was also in love with Kotona even though HE NEVER TOLD HARU HE WAS!! We end on a nice ending scene of Yu and Astrid holding hands.
Like I said, writing a movie is hard when you only have so much time to fit it all in. But Ni No Kuni, despite how charming it looks, fails to deliver a satisfying story that is consistent, compelling, or logical. The characters are rather static and I felt like they started at point A and ended at point A and a half. Fine to watch if you're a fan of Ghibli style movies, but I'd skip it if you're more a fan of movies with satisfying plots and characters that don't leave out GIANT chunks of explanation. Had this movie been closer to two and a half hours, it might have been able to address those glaring issues.
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