Well, this is awkward. We will get to that, but first a little summary of what this is, and why you should watch it. Lost In starlight is the latest Netflix release, but with an actual MPAA rating (suggesting an intent to submit likely for Animated Feature), and it hails from a South Korean Animation Studio. I don’t know why I needed to specify South, since things don’t come out of North Korea. Could you imagine them just suddenly submitting something for the International Oscar category? Bananas.

So, it is Korean, animated, so not anime, but inspired by the art form, and also probably not for kids. It also isn’t content that is inappropriate for kids, it just takes a more grown up approach. In fact, I think I could convince blind people this film wasn’t animated. it is basically a romantic comedy/drama with science fiction elements, but those elements are realistic and attainable in the near future, not the distant future full of wishes and dreams. Less flying cars, and more first manned mission to Mars. Our lead is a young woman whose mother was on the first mission, and she’s training to be on the next mission. Something has happened, her Mom may or may not be dead, and her dad is certainly feeling the weight of the potential loss. She breaks a record player one day, and runs into jay, who was a former musician but now works a sensible job. He offers to fix her record player, and that’s how they get to know each other. It is cute, because there’s this culture thrown in, where she has to call him Sir until they’ve met three different times. Once the device is fixed, she just uses it as a bluetooth speaker instead of a record player, and immediately plays her favorite song. Turns out, this song no one has ever heard was a little demo Jay did, uploaded, and took down. He didn’t think anyone had heard it. So, she gets to encourage him on his journey, but when it eventually comes time to support her trip to Mars, how will this relationship figure it out?

the movie is fine. It is a cute enough romance that doesn’t fall into silly animation tropes, like having some bonkers comic sidekick, or musical numbers that aren’t organically part of him being a musician. The English dub cast was really good, with the film actually employing notable film actors to do the roles. Christina Valenzuela and Justin H Minh, the latter who was the star of Shortcomings last year.

the audio description, and this is my honest opinion, was just OK. The written text was fine, but the voice didn’t really feel at all engaged or engaging. It was a very flat performance, and Netflix has a habit of opting to use TTS on international fare. Color me surprised to see IDC, and an actual narrator credited. Not only did I think the narrator was too adjacent to these AI voices, and it wasn’t helped by some audio ducking. There were some moments, especially when the sound effects or music was swelling, where the audio description came in and caused these weird drops in film sound volume, which is typical of the TTS voices since there’s a little bit of limitation on just how much mixing you can do while overlaying a voice that isn’t real.

Again, not a bad track, but those would be the notes I would have, and simply seeing the credits at the end shouldn’t change how I felt while experiencing the film. lost In Starlight is maybe the best Animated feature so far this year, but the bar is low, and there haven’t been as many releases in this genre.

Fresh: Final Grade: 76/100