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Summer Time Rendering - Review (Spoiler-Free)

           Rating: 9/10

  

            It has been a long time since I’ve watched a recent anime and felt thrilled by watching it while admiring its plot and pacing. Summer Time Rendering is an exciting story full of plot twists, great character writing, incredibly well-thought pacing and a satisfying ending to an amazing journey. It’s available for streaming on Disney Plus, so if you have a subscription, I recommend checking it out as soon as possible.

One of the most interesting mechanisms that’s used in Summer Time Rendering is time travel. As a mechanism or a gimmick, time travel has been used again and again in media. If time travel was a horse, it’s been resurrected and beaten to death way too many times. But Summer Time Rendering not only manages to use this mechanism/gimmick to full extent, it does so in a refreshing way. The ability to time travel is something that fits in the lore of the story, and the way the protagonist’s limited control of the power makes it something that he can’t exactly spam.

Now, onto the story. It begins with death. The protagonist, Shinpei, returns to his hometown to attend the funeral of Ushio, the girl he grew up with. After his return, he is reunited with Mio, Ushio’s younger sister, and his other friends. While Ushio’s cause of death was drowning, soon they have reason to suspect that Ushio was murdered, and possibly by something supernatural. There is a local legend in Hitogashima Island about 'Shadows', doppelgangers whose sightings ensure death.

I don’t want to say much else about the story because the plot development and the twists of Summer Time Rendering are what make it a rewarding experience. The supernatural elements of the story are well done. This will surprise no one at the shadowy doppelgangers are murderous supernatural creatures and they have a threatening presence in the island with an end goal in mind. On top of all that, the 'big-bad-villain' is powerful, intelligent and competent.

Finally, the pacing. My god, the writer(s) definitely know how to pace a story. I didn’t think there was anything boring about the story. The slow bits were either entertaining or full of suspense, and they gradually ramped the intensity of the action scenes with every instance. The show knows that too much of a good thing is never really good, as such there is plenty of variation in the pacing. There are action moments that follow up with even more tense action, there are much needed lulls in the storm to prepare us for the next scenes, or just little pockets of quiet relief in between the actions that work to both create variation and to instill suspense.

I won’t talk about the ending, because only a monster would do that. From my perspective, the ending concluded up all the plot points and answered all the questions I could have asked. I suppose if I were to nitpick I would find something here or there, but I thought the story was wrapped up neatly and that the ending was the natural conclusion of the elements that the story had set up so far.
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