The Love Live series is a very influential anime for the idol genre, a type of anime that focuses on characters looking to be celebrities and famous. Because of that, it’s appropriate for viewers to have high expectations for it. After Love Live Sunshine, the second story of the series, concluded, Over the Rainbow was highly anticipated. It finally came out in Japan in 2019, 2 years after the end of Sunshine. But, rather than being a continuation of a beloved story, it seems to have fallen flat.  Already, feedback didn’t meet expectations.It wasn’t in a good way, either.

Over the Rainbow is a sequel to the Love Live Sunshine story: showing the Aqours’ last 9 members getting together before the 3rd years, Mari, Kanan, and Dia, move on from being an idol for good. Confused, probably, think of it like if Harry Potter had stopped studying magic and decided to start a career as a K-Pop idol. But in this case, it was bad.

The first movie, Love Live! School Idol Movie, showed the message of inspiration, it’s easy to spark emotion with inspiration. However, the themes and stories in Sunshine are hard to produce in such a short runtime. To get that rush of emotion from a story based around accepting that not all dreams come true, takes a lot more than two hours. Instead the emotional beats the story tries to get to fall flat because they’re too condensed.

The themes and side plots felt unresolved. The parts you were supposed to get emotional at were not supported by buildup; they ultimately fail to strike you the same way those types of scenes do in the previous anime series.

The movie simply didn’t live up to the hype. There were too many cons for the pros and to help the movie come back. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it certainly didn’t reach the expectations set for it. Unfortunately, the decision to turn the series into a feature film left too much unsaid to be recommend to anyone not already a fan of the characters.