This style of storytelling persists throughout this entire segment and gives us all we need to know in order to understand and hopefully care for Isabella and her growth, which is something I don’t recall happening in the series (or at least not that much) due to the weekly 22-minute format not allowing enough time for the episodic stuff to breathe and the one-off characters to experience personal growth.
How she subtly reacts to Violet’s presence as someone she doesn’t want to get close to and how she has more difficulty adjusting to the life of a noble than Pip from Great Expectations with very little actual dialogue. In fact, I feel like the movie should have ended after this part was over for reasons I’ll get into later, but I guess we’d just have a 45-minute long movie if that happened, wouldn’t we? The thing I latched onto the most with this portion of the movie was the older sister’s, Isabella’s, animation. Part 1 of the movie is easily what I consider to be the better part. Let’s focus on each half separately, shall we? It actually consists of two halves with the first half focusing on Violet and her three-month period with the older sister as she has to deal with her new rich life style, and the second half takes place three years later (and no, Violet and her crew do not look any different after the timeskip aside from maybe one girl getting a change in hairstyle) with the younger sister trying to get a job as a mailman under Benedict’s tutelage. The story of this film basically centers itself around familial bonds, distance, and the expectations of society with the actual execution of these themes being alright. Remember Benedict? That smug co-worker who disarmed a bomb and saved Violet in the finale of the series and didn’t really do much besides that? If you were frustrated by how little focus he got compared to his female co-workers, you’ll be happy to know that while we don’t learn a lot about him in general, we get to know him more as a character when he ends up having to take over Violet’s baby-sitting duties halfway through the film.
You could easily watch this anime as a stand-alone product and understand everything that happens in it, especially since the only returning character to get any semblance of characterization in this film is Benedict. The movie doesn’t really attach itself to the main series beyond some of the returning characters and mild references. Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll is a feature-length version of a typical Violet Evergarden episode, and the main spotlight for this venture are two girls who grew up poor together to the point that they ended up becoming sisters for each other, only to be adopted by rich folk at the cost of never being able to see each other again. While we wait for the proper sequel movie, let’s see how the spin-off film did.
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