The Relative Worlds
あした世界が終わるとしても (Ashita Sekai ga Owaru toshitemo)
- Action
- Drama
- Romance
- Sci-Fi
- Military
- Psychological
- School
- Super Power
- Episodes
- 1
- Duration
- 1 hr 33 min
- Aired
- Jan 25, 2019
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
Shin Hazama has kept his emotions locked away since his mother’s sudden, unexplained death in childhood. With his scientist father consumed by his work, the one steady presence in Shin’s life is Kotori Izumi—his longtime friend and the kind, well-liked daughter of his father’s employer. As their final year of high school draws to a close, the two finally start to take steps forward together, both personally and romantically.
That fragile progress shatters when Shin’s father dies just as abruptly, and the truth behind both deaths begins to surface. Shin and Kotori are pulled into contact with operatives from a parallel-world Japan—an advanced, dystopian counterpart—where Shin’s “relative self,” Jin, is locked in conflict with the humanoid weapons Miko and Niko. Because the lives of relative selves are intertwined, Jin must keep Shin alive to protect them both, even as he pursues a second mission: killing Kotori to topple the ruthless rule of her own counterpart, Princess Kotoko—Jin’s sworn enemy and the one responsible for Shin’s parents’ deaths. With their world upended, Shin and Kotori are forced to face what they truly mean to each other, even with tomorrow uncertain.
Otaku Consensus
The Relative Worlds lands as a mixed but memorable sci-fi romance: Yuuhei Sakuragi’s direction and Craftar Studios’ full-CGI presentation give the film a polished, big-screen identity that several reviewers singled out as its strongest asset. Its compact feature format keeps the school romance, military action, and alternate-universe mythology moving, but the same compression is also the dominant complaint, with critics often finding the pacing too rushed for its heavier psychological and political ideas. The result is a 6/10-range cult curiosity rather than a consensus favorite, better valued for its visual ambition and pulp-sci-fi hook than for narrative smoothness.
Why You Should Watch
Watch The Relative Worlds if you want a self-contained sci-fi romance that trades slow-burn worldbuilding for immediate stakes, full-CGI spectacle, and a moodier high-school emotional core. It scratches part of the same itch as Your Name.’s fate-linked romance, but reroutes that feeling through alternate-Japan militarism, humanoid weapons, and psychological pressure instead of cosmic melancholy. Viewers who like anime films that feel like compressed light-novel epics will get the most out of it: big concepts, heightened emotion, and sword-and-superpower clashes packed into a single sitting. It is especially suited to fans curious about CG anime that does not try to hide its digital identity, using clean character models and glossy action staging as part of its futuristic texture.
Key Characters
- SShin Hazama(VA: Yuuki Kaji)
Shin is the film’s emotional pressure point, a withdrawn lead whose guarded performance lets Yuuki Kaji play grief, hesitation, and romantic vulnerability without turning him into a conventional action hero.
- KKotori Izumi(VA: Maaya Uchida)
Kotori stands out because the film treats her warmth and social ease as dramatically active traits, not just love-interest softness, making her central to both the romance and the world’s moral stakes.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
Craftar Studios produced the film as a full-CGI anime, a choice reflected in its AniList tag profile where Full CGI is one of the highest-confidence tags at 85%. The movie’s defenders consistently point to the sleek digital look and cinema-scale presentation as its clearest advantage.
- 2
Yuuhei Sakuragi served as both director and scriptwriter, giving the movie a single-author feel uncommon in committee-driven franchise entries. That creative consolidation helps explain why the film feels tightly focused even when its mythology is dense.
- 3
The film compresses action, drama, romance, sci-fi, school life, military conflict, and psychological tension into one finished feature rather than a TV cour. That structure is central to both its appeal and its criticism: it has no filler, but little room to breathe.
- 4
Its genre blend is unusually specific: AniList’s tags emphasize Alternate Universe at 96%, Magic at 70%, and Artificial Intelligence at 50%, while database themes list Military, Psychological, School, and Super Power. The appeal is in seeing those normally separate anime lanes collide inside a romance framework.
- 5
AIMYON performs the ending theme, giving the film a notable J-pop anchor outside the usual anime-song circuit. Her presence adds a recognizable mainstream music credit to an otherwise niche original anime film.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The Relative Worlds was released as a single-episode theatrical anime on January 25, 2019, rather than as a seasonal TV series. Its database footprint reflects that unusual format: one completed entry with film-style pacing and feature-length expectations.
- Fun fact 2
- The key visual team includes Yuka Okamoto as art director and Hiroki Matsuura as animation director, with Tomohiko Ishii credited as producer. Those credits underline that the film’s reputation is tied as much to its production design and CG execution as to its story.
- Fun fact 3
- Fan and critic scores place it in a distinctly divisive middle ground: MyAnimeList lists it at 6.35 from 8,075 votes, while AniList reports 60/100 and 111 favourites. That gap between modest averages and a small pocket of committed fans matches its status as a niche CG sci-fi romance.
- Fun fact 4
- Several English-language reviews frame the film as visually impressive but narratively uneven, with one positive line of criticism stressing that the cinema-sized screen improves the experience. The recurring counterpoint is pacing, especially how quickly the movie moves through its alternate-world rules and emotional turns.
- Fun fact 5
- Its AniList tag mix includes both Isekai at 50% and Alternate Universe at 96%, a useful distinction for genre fans: the film is closer to parallel-world collision than to the standard reincarnation-or-summoning template.
Studios
- Craftar Studios
