Non-spoiler thoughts:
I had a lot of fun watching this one together as a group! I probably wouldn’t have gotten around to it otherwise, so it was nice to pop in. Watching with English subtitles (except for one very short sequence with baked-in Japanese subs) was definitely the right call for me; I would’ve missed most of the nuance of the story without them, though to a certain extent, this movie tells its story in such a big, overblown way, I think it’s true that you can probably follow at least the basic plot even with next to zero Japanese.
Spoiler thoughts:
I read essentially nothing about this movie before going in; basically just the content warnings and that’s it, haha, so I had no idea what the plot would be, and certainly had no idea that it was a musical! That part was so much fun! I really like musicals, but I especially like weird musicals, and this one is definitely up there, haha.
Something I love about musicals is that the medium allows them to express emotions in a way that makes them feel as big as they actually feel to us when we’re experiencing them. This movie made a lot of, uh, unconventional choices for when to suddenly segue into a musical sequence, but I think that really worked for it on a level of both absurd dark comedy and also bringing out a lot of emotion from the characters that we rarely see expressed in this manner in other media.
And yeah, despite all of the, uh, death and such, it really was somehow a heartwarming family movie, haha. I like how everything that happened, even the most absurd bits, were all in service of that core theme.
The claymation parts were… well, they happened, haha. I don’t know if that choice fully worked for me or not. I think in many ways, it was mostly a distraction from what the rest of the movie was doing, but hey, I respect the filmmaker for trying something bold there. I suppose they’re sort of a visual shorthand for representing cartoonishly dramatic moments that get solved with basically the power of movie magic.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s too bad to sound like someone who’s clearly still trying to learn how to speak the language! Your experience with being able to understand that guy reminded me of when I hear Chris Brookes speak Japanese in DDT Pro Wrestling, haha, because everything he says is way easier for me because his Japanese is lower level than native speakers’.
I was so happy and proud of myself for being able to understand (DDT spoilers) his entire post-match promo after he won the KO-D Championship this weekend 
. It’s encouraging as a language learner, I feel, to see the kind of positive reception someone like him gets from the Japanese fans, who are just so happy that he has worked as hard as he has to learn the language so that he can better communicate with them. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if his Japanese is imperfect, or if he still sounds like a foreigner. He’s able to get his meaning across, and his earnest feelings really come across, and that’s what counts!
I feel like if we attempt to speak to someone in Japanese, we’re probably much more likely to come across as a Chris Brookes than a Richard, haha.
. It was 
