Synopsis

Enclosed within a giant bubble and completely submerged, Tokyo is a drowned city where the only people left are orphaned kids who use the flooded, gravity-warped ruins as a parkour arena. That's the setup for Bubble, a 2022 ONA from Wit Studio. Hibiki is an 18-year-old with ridiculous parkour talent and hypersensitive hearing that keeps him isolated from everyone around him. He keeps hearing a strange melody coming from Tokyo Tower, and when he finally tries to reach it, he nearly drowns, only to be saved by Uta, a girl who seems to literally be made from the bubbles themselves. From there, it becomes this story about connection between two people who don't quite fit into the world, wrapped inside some genuinely jaw-dropping action sequences. The parkour scenes have that signature Wit Studio fluidity, the same team behind Attack on Titan, and the gravity-bending environments give them so much to play with visually. Hiroyuki Sawano handles the soundtrack, so the emotional beats hit exactly the way you'd expect from his work. The whole thing is loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid, which gives the romance this bittersweet undercurrent. If you liked the atmospheric romance of Your Name or Weathering with You, or you were into the visual ambition of Belle, this sits comfortably in that space, gorgeous animation, a contained love story, and a world that feels both beautiful and sad. It's one film, about two hours, so it's an easy watch.