That was an interesting movie. I watched it yesterday evening, but decided to sleep on it before posting a review of it.
First of all, I'll say that it was an enjoyable watch. It had a lot of excellent scenes, and it was visually beautiful in many key spots.
But what I found different about it is that it didn't quite feel like a movie to me.
In
some ways it was like a movie. The first few minutes were very movie-esque. The slow, panning shots of Yui's bedroom before Yui wakes up. The highly dramatized music playing in the clubroom. The early reassurance that the characters you knew and loved from the TV show are still the same (which I think is much of the point of that first club scene).
But a movie tends to have a clear premise, a clear climax, and a plot that clearly builds up to that climax. Then a short aftermath.
That's not really the case here. The trip to London is too long to be a mere side-story or subplot, but it's also not long enough to truly define the movie. If somebody asked me "What is the K-On! movie about?", I don't think I could just say "It's about them going on a trip to London, England!"
I guess it's about the unique relationship dynamics between Azusa and the rest of the K-On band (Yui especially). That seems to be the common thread stretching through just about the entirety of the movie, and it is pretty well developed. The problem here, for me, is that I actually felt that the TV show did complete justice to this, especially the last couple of episodes.
So I can't help but think that the trip to London
is what the movie should have been about. That it should have been stretched out more, that the final London concert that the K-On! girls participated in should have been the climatic moment of the movie. That this would have made it feel more like a true cinematic experience, and not like a few consecutive TV episodes of K-On spliced together to make a movie. As is, the last quarter or so of the movie makes it feel like just a grand exercise in filling in a gap left by the TV show chronology.
Still, it
was an enjoyable watch. Some lists of pros and cons in the tl;dr tags below.
All-told, it was a nice watch. In truth, it probably exceeded my expectations some, in spite of the flaws I did point out. The K-On! franchise always struck me as a really hard one to turn into a movie (at a creative level, obviously not at a commercial level), but KyoAni did a pretty good job of it, all things considered.
8/10 is my final rating for this.