Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi Review

Whilst Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi is an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes, its premise and presentation reek of laziness and desperation.

However, at the same time, I can’t imagine newcomers to the series will get much out of it either, as it has a tendency to skip over potentially vital exposition in order to cram a whole season’s worth of television into a tight 91 minutes. As a result of that, I feel like anyone who is unfamiliar with Blue Lock would just be confused by Episode Nagi. So, who is this actually for?

Well, funnily enough, I actually think Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi was perfectly designed to suit me in particular, being someone who is a big fan of the anime and manga but hasn’t engaged with it in the last year or so. So, whilst most of Episode Nagi may be familiar to those who have just got done bingeing Blue Lock, to me it actually felt quite fresh. Yes, I knew how all of its plotlines would end, but I’d luckily mostly forgotten the journey there, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to experience it all over again.

Was this the filmmaker’s intent? To exclusively appeal to people who like Blue Lock but haven’t read it in a while? Honestly, no. I imagine their intent was essentially just to make money, and everything about Episode Nagi, from its premise to its presentation, reeks of desperation, even if it does end up going down quite nicely.

For those unfamiliar with Blue Lock, it began life as a manga written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and illustrated by Yusuke Nomura. The story combines two things I’m a sucker for: football/soccer and an incredibly intricate, long-form competition. After Japan’s underperformance at the 2018 World Cup, the Japan Football Union hire a comically over-the-top mad genius quite literally called Ego (Hiroshi Kamiya) to try and turn the Japanese national team into one capable of winning trophies. His solution is to try and create a world-class Japanese striker, and his chosen method is to take a large handful of young prospects and put them into a rigorous training camp, where they compete in a series of football-related challenges designed to improve their skills and hone their ego, with the last one remaining getting the chance to represent their country on the big stage.

Whilst the series follows underdog Yoichi Isagi (Kazuki Ura) during his time in the training camp, Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi shifts focus to one of the side characters, namely Seishirō Nagi (Nobunaga Shimazaki), a lazy underachiever with absurd amounts of natural talent. The movie attempts to tell the entirety of season 1 through Nagi’s eyes, showing us how he adapted to the Blue Lock training camp as well as giving us a look into how he grew to like football in the first place. Now, let me preface this next point by saying that Nagi is a very interesting character: he appears to completely lack an ego, which helps differentiate from everyone around him, and the fact that he has all the natural talent in the world but lacks the necessary work ethic to become the best makes him a fun reversal of a typical anime protagonist. 

With that being said, though, Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi suffers from one major flaw. We’ve already seen Nagi’s story. Everything important, excluding the very beginning where he sees him meet his best friend Mikage (Yuma Uchida) for the first time, has already been shown to us in season 1. It’s strange; if there was no show, Episode Nagi would have an excellent plot for an anime sports movie. Nagi is a compelling character and his relationship with Mikage, the spoiled rich kid who forces him to play football in order to help fuel his dream of making it professionally, is an interesting one to watch develop. However, it’s completely ruined by the fact that we know where it’s going. There’s absolutely no element of surprise here, and what should be the most interesting scenes in the movie are the ones that were already present in the show. 

Surely then, it should work as a standalone movie, right? If I was to show it to my girlfriend, who thinks a Blue Lock is something a Smurf would use to keep their door shut, surely she should get something from it? The unfortunate answer is that, no, she wouldn’t. Episode Nagi is so concerned with covering everything in the least amount of time possible that it ends up skimming over context and vital exposition. I completely understand that they made those choices assuming that everyone who watched it would have seen Blue Lock and so know what was going on, but then why essentially just make a 90 minute recap and pretend it’s a major feature film? From beginning to end, Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi feels confused and desperate, made solely so that they can say that there is a Blue Lock film.

Even on a technical level, it stinks of desperation. It’s constantly switching between gorgeous, striking animation and some of the ugliest CG I’ve seen in a cinema. In order to try and replicate the movements seen in professional football, Blue Lock occasionally dips its toes in 3D CG animation in wide shots, which is vaguely similar to the animation style seen in the excellent The First Slam Dunk (2023). Now, this works fine for a TV show, where the smaller TV screen can obscure just how amateurish it can look, but on a cinema screen? It was honestly distracting, and hindered the otherwise dynamic and exciting football scenes that serve as the movie’s main action spectacles. 

Despite all of this though, I did enjoy Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi. Again, I think a large amount of that is due to the fact that whilst I did already know and love the source material, my memory of it was somewhat fuzzy, so some scenes that more hardcore fans would have known off by heart felt somewhat new to me. Its setpieces are mostly thrilling and wonderful to behold, its drama is delightfully over-the-top and on a moment to moment level, it looks gorgeous.

Nagi is a fascinating character, and whilst the movie lacks any new curveballs to throw at you regarding where his plotline goes, I have to admit that his story is a compelling one, and so I didn’t mind seeing it all over again. More than anything, this film confused me, and whilst I would recommend it, I would suggest watching Blue Lock first, and then waiting a year or two before you give Episode Nagi a shot.

Blue Lock The Movie – Episode Nagi is out now globally in theaters.