By Matthew Moorcroft

Strong Recommendation

• Directed by Takashi Katagiri
• Starring Takuya Eguchi, Atsumi Tanezaki, Saori Hayami, Kenichiro Matsuda
• PG-13

The delightfully silly antics of the Forger family, anime’s newest pop culture icons, is difficult to describe to non-fans or those unfamiliar with the series. The unassumingly complex premise – which involves two characters who don’t know a thing about each other, one who knows everything, and a dog who somehow also does – is mostly just a tableau for wacky comedic scenarios, spy plots that escalate into purposeful nonsense, and heartfelt, emotional beats that involve the tried and true trope of found family. It’s remarkably effective, and the unexpected popularity of the series is a nice change of pace for Shonen Jump who is in desperate need of new blood.

Code: White, their first feature length outing together, is their toughest mission yet. After all, how can one translate the somewhat episodic – maybe even fragmented – narrative style of the show into a feature length format? Code: White‘s answer is to mostly play it safe and go for the greatest hits mode: Loid gets his intellectual schemes, Yor kicks ass, and Anya is… well, she’s Anya. This is really all you need sometimes, and as greatest hits modes go this is easily one of the stronger examples of it, with episode director/assistant turned lead director Takashi Katagiri clearly having a handle on how to deal with these characters. It’s a hard to hate film from a hard to hate series, wearing a smile on it’s face as early as frame one.

And as early as frame one as well, Code: White makes it clear it plans to really be a merging of the spy action and familial comedy that both define the series. While the show has both of these in spades, the majority of it’s best moments are when it uses the both at the same time, and the cruise ship arc from it’s second season stands as a testament to that. As a standalone feature, it can’t have the same level of emotional gravitas that arc has – the wonders it does for Yor’s character and the relationships are hard to beat – but what it has in it’s place as fun vignettes that go from range from hilarious to fun to genuinely heartfelt.

It’s also, thankfully, a visual feast. Wit Studio and CloverWorks’ collaboration on the series has always made it a cut above the rest a lot of other shows in terms of framing, boarding, and just general animation quality, but with the added benefit of a movie budget and more time it certainly takes advantage of that. Just a gorgeous looking picture from top to bottom, with excellent cinematography and blocking in both it’s comedic beats as well as it’s action scenes, as well as a mixture of animation styles that pop off the screen with colours galore. A scene in the back half of the film involving a surreal hallucination with Anya might be the highlight of the whole picture artistically, and it’s certainly the highlight comedically. The less spoiled you are on it, the better.

Working as a good starting point as well thanks quick, easy to follow introductions, I’d call Code: White a smashing success, if not a particularly bold one. But I don’t think it really needed to be some kind of transcendent piece of art that changed the game forever; there is time for that later. Instead, it’s there is a comfiness in it’s presentation, and lots of heart in it’s production that makes you, by the end, wanna jump out of your seat and just give whoever you are sitting next to a hug out of sheer delight. A fun blast of a time!