Other than a couple fun expressions and little animations, this has basically nothing in common with the show, its tone or characters.
And the thing is, the base story and character exploration as it happens is a good idea that could've easily worked as a movie of 60, or even just 45 minutes. You have basically two stories alongside each other; The story of a stone in the mountains that resembles a frog, modeled after a frog that bemourned a young girl that tragically died and whose tears made it rain a lot, and the story of a painful memory about her own grandpa Aiko has to confront while spending time with Doremi and Pop's grandparents.
The first big noticeable flaw this movie has is its pacing. There is no buildup to anything, it's constantly loud and annoying. Not a single quiet moment the show had so many of, necessary to allow its world and characters to breathe. Plot points are mentioned kinda off-handedly. Things happen for seemingly no reason. Character motivations are hard to comprehend and don't make sense at all. And likewise, the characters make no sense too. In the show you'd get a very good feeling how each of the girls thinks and acts, how they have different ways of processing things, whereas here, everyone is acting out of character or doesn't really show a character at all, like Hadzuki, Pop or Onpu, who don't have anything to do at all. Or Aiko, who right after remembering a very painful - and for some reason unbelievably exaggerated - event with her granddad, just kiind of immediately gets over it for no reason at all other than "I'm so glad I remembered this"???
And then all of a sudden, Doremi's grandpa is like "oy I might be dying soon you know" out of nowhere and everyone breaks into tears? Or how everyone is super eager to sit on his lap for no concernable reason at all? Like I would understand for Doremi or especially Pop to want that, but everyone else kinda treats it like a slide in the backyard they are eager to ride. Aforementioned Hadzuki and Onpu especially seem weird doing this. Like, I could imagine if they wanted to after spending a week or so with the grandparents, but definitely not upon the first time they really get to talk.
Then there's the visual presentation which also is incredibly off-putting. Maybe there was something wrong with the version of the movie I saw, but the frame always felt cluttered and claustrophobic, needlessly zoomed in, the camera almost hit those characters in the face on multiple occasions and the many instances of these 2D-characters just standing out against a weird CG-background.
Overall, this doesn't work at all. I would really like to know about the production history of this one, because it feels like it was supposed to be a much longer movie, but was then cut short to fit a normal episode's length and it just feels unbelievably wrong.
