Sakasama no Patema

Patema is a plucky young girl from an underground civilization boasting an incredible network of tunnels. Inspired by a friend that mysteriously went missing, she is often reprimanded due to her constant excursions of these tunnels due to her royal status. After she enters what is known as the "forbidden zone," she accidentally falls into a giant bottomless pit after being startled by a strange creature.

Finding herself on the surface, a world literally turned upside down, she begins falling towards the sky only to be saved by Age, a discontented student of the totalitarian nation known as Aiga. The people of Aiga are taught to believe that "Inverts," like Patema, are sinners that will be "swallowed by the sky," but Age has resisted this propaganda and decides to protect his new friend. A chance meeting between two curious teenagers leads to an exploration of two unique worlds as they begin working together to unveil the secrets of their origins in Sakasama no Patema, a heart-warming film about overcoming differences in order to coexist.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Patema Main

Fujii, Yukiyo Japanese

Age Main

Okamoto, Nobuhiko Japanese

Porta Supporting

Oohata, Shintarou Japanese

Jaku Supporting

Yasumoto, Hiroki Japanese

Izamura Supporting

Hashi, Takaya Japanese

Lagos Supporting

Katou, Masayuki Japanese

Kaho Supporting

Uchida, Maaya Japanese

Elder Supporting

Fukumatsu, Shinya Japanese

Inagaki, Ryousuke Producer

Yoshiura, Yasuhiro Director, Script, Layout, Original Creator, Director of Photography

Yamaoka, Akira Sound Director

Arias, Michael Script

Reviews

Oct 27, 2025

1stDecame4Danime

Recommended

This movie had the potential to be a masterpiece, but it shot itself in the foot quite a bit.
It starts off great, fantastical, decent dialogue, decent characters (it was quite a bit like a scifi Made in Abyss), but then it starts to get dumb in lots of little ways and it becomes progressively harder to overlook all the lack of survival instinct and contrivances and the dialogue/everything starts to take a nosedive as the pedo nazi Betelgeuse starts cringing across the screen and the brains stop braining (the main characters play out conversations of genuine idiocy when trying to overcome the most basic challenge ... of perspective taking that children already learned yet this movie seems to think is incredibly deep and difficult to understand that it takes every opportunity to dumb it down, also for a movie about perspective they fail multiple times to account for the character's perspective, like when she was already able to first see the stars before moving away, or even by saving the fmc in the end when the boy blindly jumps to save her despite having been unable to see her to do so) and the physics stop physicsing... (Why the fuck would you build all this when all you have to do is eat/drink inverted food/water for a few weeks to flip your weight? They put the chain weight on her boot and multiple times this girl would rather die than take the extra weight off. Making a public display of building an airmachine in an authoritarian culture that criminalizes anything of the sort while hiding what was a jew to nazis.)

They had the unique opportunity to depict the surface of the world as upside down with them hanging over an endless abyss of sky. Instead they decided to almost exclusively depict the surface as rightside up just like everything ever and instead flip the underground tunnels upside down, tunnels where, like space, there is no actual frame of reference for rightside up... what a pointless waste of an opportunity to actually have interesting visuals all just to convey egregiously in-your-face and on-the-nose themes of the boy character struggling with basic perspective taking by hand holding the audience through his braindead pov as characters voice their incredulity and eventual understanding of such a basic concept as falling to your death. Of course it wasn't only used for that, it along with most every nonsensical part of the worldbuilding (obviously I don't mean the inverted gravity premise itself) was also used to try to mislead the audience just for a dumb worldbreaking twist at the end.
Frankly, I'd recommend watching the movie with an inverted screen for those scenes after she first falls but that's a hassle.

The worldbuilding is absolutely destroyed by the end of the movie. (The building ruins are still there so they didn't get inverted and there were people who didn't get inverted and there are people right here who aren't inverted so why is it completely uninhabited when they have every reason to be growing food here so that they could feed themselves and more importantly revert people to normal gravity by eating it?)

I don't think there was much reason to justify how much they focused on that pointless little lava-lamp blood vial. I suppose it was probably the balloon father's blood in an opposite gravity vial and yeah friendship/unifying opposite groups/gravities and perspective symbolisms and all but it had no actual purpose in the plot and they just kept focusing on it and it was nonsense that she hadn't lost it with everything else, and in its final scene when it broke they messed up the gravity of the blood by having it the same as the vial when it was supposed to be the opposite (maybe it is just a lava-lamp).

The art/animation and sound are all really great.

The authoritarian world was quite boring and the movie really suffered there especially with the dumb save the princess plotline direction they decided to take the story on top of all the dumb contrivances just to get there and after.

I give up. It's a pretty good movie, I'm just disappointed since it had so much potential to be a 10/10 instead.
8/10 (where 5/10 is average)

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Dec 27, 2024

MidniteAndBeyond

Mixed Feelings

I really wanted to like this one... When I heard the premise, I was immediately on board. It sounded like it had so much potential for a really compelling story, especially in the romance and drama department. But it was all just sorta.... not fun? The story was a lot more bleak and grim than I was expecting. There are also a LOT of very ridiculously specific happenstances that the plot hinges on in order to stay afloat (heh). The visuals are also incredibly bland, which was disappointing. I would love to see another film or show take this premise and try to do something ... better, because the pitch is really, REALLY interesting. It just took it in a direction that I really didn't care for.

5/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Sep 12, 2020

DasPizzar

Not Recommended

While the basic idea is neat, the execution of it deserves execution. The antagonists are so comically evil, you'd think it's satire, but it is not, this shit takes itself very seriously. Whatever depth this movie could have gets destroyed by the movie shoving everything into the viewers face, no subtlety at all. this is the most obvious when the movie repeatedly flips the image upside down to tell you something about how important perspective is, despite how obvious that message already is given the main gimmick of the film. The only good thing about this dumpsterfire is the character Patema herself and the animation ... itself. All other characters are either boring, only have one character trait, don't have any reason to be in the movie or all of the above. From the first 10-15 minutes onward, you can just guestimate wtf is going to happen next. I suppose if you don't care about that and want to be treated like a gradeschooler by a visual artform, go for it

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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	Poll: Sakasama no Patema Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 5 ) Takanakaiyo - Oct 12, 2013	249 replies	by JackCompletes »» Nov 2, 11:47 PM
	can someone explain the end to me (spoilers) Scootboi - May 22, 2014	31 replies	by Rob7 »» May 31, 5:07 AM
	So what exactly is good about this movie? Nyron - Dec 28, 2014	34 replies	by YahiyaX777L »» Jul 11, 2024 2:58 AM
	Is Sakasama no Patema a romance? Hosny - Jul 20, 2017	5 replies	by YahiyaX777L »» Jul 11, 2024 2:56 AM
	Sooooo trippy but quite enjoyable :) lola_ - Sep 4, 2022	8 replies	by YahiyaX777L »» Jul 11, 2024 2:53 AM

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