It is flawlessly animated, and always gorgeous to look at.
But that's about it.
Sort of [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]-lite story could have been so so so much better.
I finally finished watching it after giving it 3 goes.
Every time I dozed off and when I finally finished it it wasn't worth it.
I kind of agree and disagree. The animation is fantastic, that's plain to see, but it's easy to miss the underlying story if you don't grasp the subtext. I imagine the film was aiming for a larger audience and the makers of the film knew addressing these issues more directly would give the movie a higher rating and would alienate a large portion of the audience who wouldn't be able to watch the film because they'd be too young for such material.
SPOILERS AHEAD....
This is a coming of age story. That part of the story is obvious. What isn't obvious is that the story is about the concept of banning sex from every day life. Of course, in the movie they didn't use the word "sex". Instead they made an analogy between "cell phones" to represent sex. So in essence they were banning sex from the high school because they felt that somehow sexual expressions of emotion (I.e. Possibly flirting) was interfering with the students ability to evolve intellectually, as represented by psychic ability. This is why the main protagonist pulls his cellphone out of the crotch section of his bathing suit in that scene where the student council president was suspending his friend from school. I mean who keeps their cell phone in their speedos? The fact that him and his childhood girlfriend were wearing bathing suits is a substitute for nudity.
As you may have noticed there is no "war". The war they're referring to is the classic war between abstinence and sexual activity. It may also refer to the classic war between the sexes embodied by way the main protagonist's girlfriend constantly keeps hitting him in the number of ways and the war of teenaged emotional angst embodied through love, unrequited love, and depression, etc.
There is a lot of other stuff going on as well but it would take forever to get into it.