Fireworks

打ち上げ花火、下から見るか？横から見るか？ (Uchiage Hanabi, Shita kara Miru ka? Yoko kara Miru ka?)

6.1(117,252)

MAL Score

Ranked #10387

Popularity #1246

Romance
Sci-Fi
Psychological
School
Time Travel

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Aired: Aug 18, 2017
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

During a summer break in a seaside town, Norimichi Shimada and his friends become fixated on a simple question: do fireworks look round or flat when viewed from the side? Their curiosity leads them to the Moshimo Festival, where they hope the night’s display will finally settle the debate.

At the same time, Norimichi is pulled into something far more personal when his classmate Nazuna Oikawa decides to run away from home and asks him to come with her. When their escape doesn’t go as planned, a mysterious orb Nazuna carries offers an unexpected way to try again—giving them another chance to stay together as the summer night twists into something stranger.

Otaku Consensus

Fireworks remains a divisive Shaft romance: its best qualities are Akiyuki Shinbou and Nobuyuki Takeuchi’s stylized direction, Akio Watanabe’s polished character designs, and a one-night time-reset structure that treats adolescent longing as something unstable and subjective. The lukewarm reception reflected by its 6.11 MAL score and 59/100 AniList score comes from a consistent complaint: the pacing and adaptation choices make the emotional beats feel more fragmented than cathartic.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Fireworks if you want a compact, mood-first romance that uses sci-fi as emotional pressure rather than puzzle-box mechanics. It scratches a related itch to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Your Name, but strips the scale down to a rural school-age memory: swimming pools, seaside light, festival anticipation, and the awkward intensity of teenagers trying to act older than they are. Viewers who like Shaft’s taste for artificial compositions, heightened gestures, and psychologically tilted spaces will get more from it than viewers wanting clean time-travel rules or a conventionally satisfying romance. Its appeal is in the POV slippage: the film keeps asking whether a moment is being relived, reimagined, or idealized after the fact.

Key Characters

N
Norimichi Shimada
Norimichi is interesting less as a decisive romantic lead than as a boy whose hesitations turn the film’s time-travel device into a portrait of adolescent regret.
N
Nazuna Oikawa
Nazuna is framed as both classmate and fantasy image, which is why fan discussion often centers on whether the film understands her as a person or as Norimichi’s projection.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Shaft produced the film, and the studio’s house style is visible in its composed surfaces, theatrical blocking, and willingness to make ordinary school and seaside spaces feel psychologically unreal.
2
Akiyuki Shinbou is credited as chief director while Nobuyuki Takeuchi directed and handled art design, giving the movie a strong visual authorship split between Shaft’s established formalism and Takeuchi’s image-driven layout sense.
3
The film is listed as a single-episode anime entry, so its romance, sci-fi, school, and psychological elements are compressed into movie form rather than paced across a television cour.
4
Its AniList tag profile is unusually specific for a romance film: Heterosexual, Rural, Coming of Age, Male Protagonist, Primarily Teen Cast, School, POV, and Swimming all point to a story built around adolescent viewpoint rather than broad genre spectacle.
5
The central formal hook is repetition with altered perspective, making the time-travel element less about rules and more about how teenage desire edits a memory.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Shunji Iwai is credited as the original creator, linking the anime to a creator better known for live-action youth dramas and melancholic coming-of-age stories.
Fun fact 2: The Japanese title, Uchiage Hanabi, Shita kara Miru ka? Yoko kara Miru ka?, preserves the film’s central visual question in full: whether fireworks are seen from below or from the side.
Fun fact 3: The production credits list three art directors: Hisaharu Iijima, Ayumi Miyakoshi, and Yuuki Funagakure, with Nobuyuki Takeuchi also credited for art design.
Fun fact 4: Akio Watanabe served as character designer, with Hiroki Yamamura on sub-character design, a division that reflects how much the film depends on controlled character imagery and school-crowd detail.
Fun fact 5: Its audience footprint is larger than its reputation suggests: on MAL it has over 116,000 votes and a popularity rank of #1241, despite a much lower overall rank of #10317.