X is probably one of my favorite anime movies of all time. It's based on a manga of the same name by CLAMP. However the movie version tells a slightly different story than the as yet uncompleted manga (which is currently compiled in 10 tankabon).

The shojo animation by CLAMP and the character designs by Nobuteru Yuki are absolutely beautiful and are far better than the animation in some of CLAMP's earlier OAVs (i.e. RG Veda and Tokyo Babylon). The music is also excellent with the dark and gloomy soundtrack complementing the gothic feel of X perfectly. However the movie's plot suffers from two major problems. Firstly, the plot is rather slim in comparison with the X manga, sacrificing a lot of the character interaction and backstory to fit the whole manga series onto one 90 minute video. Because of this it also suffers from the same problem as RG Veda, in that there are a few parts of the movie which are seemingly unrelated to the rest of the film. It would have been much better if X had been made into a series of OAVs instead of a single movie to preserve the manga's story in its entirety. The only other problem that I had with X was that the main character, Kamui, came off as a wimp because of his voice actor. The other characters were voiced excellently but Kamui seemed to lose a lot of resentment against his fate and because of this the feeling of angst that pervades the manga series in less evident in the movie version of X.
- JH, 98.02.24