A visually captivating anime feature with a cosmic-level environmental message, Children of the Sea, based on a popular manga series in Japan, is nonetheless slow-going and hard to maintain interest in. A young teenage girl, Ruka (voiced by Mana Ashida), is the largely ignored child of a broken home. She lives with an alcoholic mother who has lost all moral authority to boss Ruka around. Her father is consumed with his work at an aquarium, a place where Ruka developed cherished memories earlier in her life. After being thrown off a school sports team for fighting, Ruka wanders around without a destination day after day and ends up in the backroom laboratories at the aquarium. There she meets a boy, Umi (Hiiro Ishibashi), who was raised by dugongs (sea mammals related to manatees), and is amphibious. Umi, along with his older brother Sora (Seishu Uragami)—who was raised the same way as Umi—both need to spend a lot of time underwater and must protect themselves from too much sunlight. Relations between Ruka and the boys are not always warm, but the magic Umi and Sora convey about the ocean taps into a latent supernatural streak in Ruka. The reasons behind her longtime affinity for the sea become clearer to her, and at a moment when mysterious events are occurring that scientists can't explain, she discovers she is destined to be part of a revelation that the ocean and stars and all of nature are one big network that includes us. It's a nice theme, and director Ayumu Watanabe brings artistic grandeur to it through lovely moments of life beneath the ocean's surface: whales and sharks and hundreds of varieties of fish. And he gives us an explosively psychedelic climax in which Ruka, and the audience by extension, learn of our place in the universe. The problem is how long everything takes, the slow crawl of the story, the long lulls between scenes of interest. Yes there is a lot of beauty to look at, but beauty alone can't make a viewer feel invested in a story. So if you don't mind an anime with a glacial flow, this is for you. For more restless souls, Children of the Sea is a lot of work. Lightly recommended. (T. Keogh)