Some new distribution has snuck on recently for this project as Pluto TV recently added a GKIDS film for streaming with the Patema Inverted film from a few years back. The work is streaming on the service, the first time for legal streaming I think, with it available to US audiences only due to how the rights were picked up by GKIDS. It’s in its original Japanese language track with English subtitles and can be found here.
Plot Concept: Patema lives in an underground world of tunnels, the long-abandoned ruins of a giant industrial complex. Though she is a princess, she is held back by the rules imposed by the elders of her clan. One day when she is exploring in a forbidden zone, she is startled by a strange bat-like creature and tumbles headlong into a void – and out into the wide open world above the surface, a place with reverse physics, where if she let go she would “fall up” into the sky and be lost forever.
Age is a student on this surface world, a totalitarian society whose compliant population has been brainwashed against the “sinners who fell into the sky.” When he spies Patema hanging upside-down from a tree, he pulls her down to safety, struggling with all his might to keep her earthbound as she grips on to him for dear life. Together their weights cancel each other out, and once they master the art of navigating competing gravitational forces, they set out to evade the leaders of Age’s world and discover the secret that keeps their worlds apart.
