I do agree with you to some extent – I can understand the natural reaction to that line, as it does sound very superficial when taken out of context. But let me tell you the way that I approached the film – I actually felt there was something “missing” from the love story from the beginning. Her constant, deep attachment to this vague person from her childhood actually bothered me increasingly as the film went on, because I couldn’t accept that any sort of meaningful love could come out of such a minor interaction with a person.

So I suppose where I diverged from you is when you say that “You get attached to not only Chiyoko, but also to the man she was chasing.”. I disagree – I was never attached to the man she was chasing, because I didn’t know him, not nearly to the extent that I came to know Chiyoko. I didn’t know who he truly was, his true ideals or personality, as we only had a brief meeting with him. So when Chiyoko uttered her final line – it was like the pieces of a puzzle finally clicking together. Chiyoko was not madly in love with a man she barely knew – her quest for him was something else, something that was equally beautiful in its bittersweet nature – the longing to remain as the girl who could be swept up in such an idealistic pursuit, even as adulthood and cynicism overtook her.

Without that line, I actually may have liked the film less, because although everything else about it was done well, the love story would still have had a slightly unconvincing or unsatisfying nature for me – can we really accept and celebrate a vague memory as real love? But with this line, which changes the meaning of the story as well as Chiyoko’s motivations, the film becomes something else, it reveals itself not as an attempt at an idealistic love story across decades, but rather a meditation on the reality of ageing and losing the idealistic dreams of one’s childhood (which, here, are embodied by the young man and Chiyoko’s confused memory of him). And this, I feel, is a more unique and worthwhile story among the anime (and otherwise) world.

In the time between me seeing the movie and today, I’ve thought about it and came to nearly the same conclusion that you have — the hag was what really nailed it for me, lol, I felt so proud.

Still, I can’t help but feel that Chiyoko’s acceptance of what she had really been doing all her life could have been handled in a much subtler manner and have the same — heck, a better, effect. When I watched the movie with my mother, she had just one complaint about the movie, the same that I and many other people have. A lot of the emotional impact of this movie comes from the romance. You get attached to not only Chiyoko, but also to the man she was chasing. You know from the beginning that it doesn’t end up well, but to see the heroine spend the whole movie chasing after this one person, loving him so much that she’ll drop everything and ‘run to him’ years later, after being married… and then telling us, seemingly out of nowhere, that she wasn’t chasing him at all, she was just chasing for the love of chasing (because that is what the line sounds like, especially if you’re watching it for the first time) is very disappointing.

The point he was trying to make was definitely valid — I usually dislike when movies have the main character fall in love when they don’t really know the other person (I’m not a big romance fan at all if you can believe it). It was a bit patronizing in execution, but it does make you think, and I suppose that a movie of this quality should make you do that.

But the average movie-goer or NetFlix-renter doesn’t tend to think too much about the movies that they watch after the fact — at least, not on any level that would justify a line like that in a seemingly romantic movie. They walk away from the movie with a bitter feeling instead. I’ve done that myself in the past. It just seems to be purposefully alienating the audience, which, while some would argue is just a normal part of art, is a very bad thing in this case. Instead of getting them to concentrate on the point of the movie, the audience walks away and never thinks about it again unless it’s to remember how disappointing that last line was.

Like I said, I still love this movie, but I definitely would have gotten rid of the last line — or, hey, added more hints that it wasn’t a man she was pursuing so that an audience expecting a love story would be able to figure it out beforehand and be satisfied with the ending rather than disappointed.

Sorry this comment is so long and may not make sense. It’s pretty late and I don’t want to reread this monster, so I’ll just hope that it sounds coherent enough the way it is.

I do want to thank you, though… I had thought that I was just over-thinking it when I took it past ‘it’s a love story with an ending that will make you want to punch the t.v.’, haha. You phrased it so eloquently, too! Beautiful, though I may not agree completely.

“When I next watch the film, one of the things I will looking out for specifically is the moment or period in her life where her longing to find the man had subtly transformed into a longing for her old self.”
Ditto.