'I Want to Eat Your Pancreas' is a common drama production to this industry. It offers generic school settings with rather superficial teenage characters. The only thing it tries to accomplish is toy with its viewers' emotions to the point of some cheap tearjerking. Those who are okay with this will most definitely see how the movie accomplishes exactly all the thing it wants to. Those who want something more from anime, should look elsewhere.

This movie is a story about death. It starts when the most perfect mary sue on the planet starts randomly talking with a no-life loser dude who happens to be her classmate. Our characters start frequently interacting with each others and supposedly grow close. They hang out and talk about dying all the time. That's pretty much the entirety of their relationship. It feels random and forced and unnatural.

Our dude is dense and has never had any friends during his pathetic life.. that's pretty much him. Our girl is really perfect and chill and that's also pretty much her. The catch being that she will die soon which further makes these two character - who are the opposites of each others (according to the narration at least) - even more the opposite because the dude is actually alive. Great.

The drama is a separate entity in the work, mainly because it is there constantly whispering to the characters --and especially to its viewers ears-- that shit will go down, just wait and see. Since the great twist is obvious from the start, the whole thing relies on the journey... where nothing spectacular ever happens and the characters feel more like meridians that try to connect the viewers to the emotions.

One could defend most of the events by looking it more from the characters perspective. I found this to be quite hard as they don't feel like real, genuine people at all. If they did, it would be understandable for our heroine to open up to a stranger, as to most people, it's often easier to talk with 3rd parties than to people close to you. Especially the whole fear of death is amazing as a concept, but I don't really see it as anything more than waste of potential in this case.

The whole main dude realizing that people actually die in real life is definitely quite an interesting idea as well.. at least to those who have never experienced this type of thing or considered that all of this could happen to literally anyone. I doubt any person who is aware of how fragile thing person's existence is, can find this specific work do them any further waking up enlightenment, other sudden realization of such things or offer much feels at all. If this movie ever serves someone, it's those viewers who are unaware of how life works, and instead of following our characters for what they are, fall into self-insert. This is one of the rare things with what the author seems self-aware of, as they say "to live is to empathize with someone." And moreover, named the male lead simply "boku" which means "I/me".

There are also several other things I'd want to complain about. Like the claim in narration that our characters are "pure and innocent." Which is really just a try hard attempt on making the viewer accept these thoughts, but the content (teenagers and alcohol) and our characters behavior (random snapping incidents) among several other scenes is the polar opposite of what I'd considered to be either of these things.. which further makes me question the author's ability to even recognize their own work for what it is. I can't say I feel very respected as a viewer when such contradictions exist in the narration.. or perhaps my comprehension of "pure" just differs with the writer.

Our writing is practically a collection of romance cliches. The only remotely original things are the concepts which it deals rather poorly with. Every event, every side character archetype and every moment that drives the story and the relationship development onward, is loaned content. There is not a single thing any romance fan hasn't seen at least 50 times before, and not only that, but the execution is so lame that I would call it offensively bad if the work managed to be less bland, but unfortunately it's not even worth of getting mad over.

If this had been 50 episodes long tv series that offered a real character portray to both of our main characters and their life, connected them, dealt with the same heavy themes. all the copy-pasted events and cliches had been abandon and the story was written by Adachi Mitsuru: this could have been the best drama the anime industry has to offer. Now it mainly looks like a random, shallow past story from any fighting tournament shonen from Nanatsu no Tanzai to Naruto except there is no character depth present in this movie and therefore it is significantly worse than let's say zero arc from Fairy Tail which dealt with rather similar concept.