Mention AI today and it immediately brings to mind mad tech bubbles, runaway investments, and environments the world over losing energy and fresh water resources as large-language-models get violently inserted into the Internet. Five years ago the idea of artificial intelligence seemed much more cosy and entertaining, and its concepts were able to power science fiction dramas without worrying that Texas would run out of drinking water to supply them. From that more innocent past comes Sing a Bit of Harmony, a feature anime directed by Yoshiura Yasuhiro. From the outside it resembles a rather forgettable high school drama. Once inside, a far more inventive and heartfelt work is there to be found.

Yoshiura’s directing debut was the 2013 film Patema Inverted, a delightfully creative science fiction drama inspired in equal measure by other anime and American filmmaker Terry Gilliam. While he has helmed such short and episodic works since, Sing a Bit of Harmony marks his second feature. Once again, it is a cine-literate film that draws smartly from Japanese and American influences – but in the latter regard Yoshiura is taking his cues not from Gilliam but from director-producer Steven Spielberg. This film feels infused with the soul of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and particularly his 1982 masterpiece E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Amano Satomi (Fukuhara Haruka) is a high schooler in a small Japanese town, who is ostracised from her peers after a previous incident at school. A new student arrives, the eccentric Shion (Tsuchiya Tao), with an inexplicable obsession with making Satomi happy and a penchant for breaking into song.

It is made clear from the outset that Shion is not a student, but rather an AI-powered android built by a local tech corporation and designed by Satomi’s mother Mitsuko (Ohara Sayaka). Shion has been inserted into a classroom as a test, to determine if she is sophisticated enough to pass as a genuine person. When she almost immediately fails that test, Satomi convinces her friends to hide Shion’s true nature from the rest of her class to give her mother’s project one more chance at success.

Sing a Bit of Harmony is a film of two halves, split between a slice-of-life high school drama and a rather unexpected heist movie. Both halves are enlivened by some light science fiction as well as, improbably, fully-fledged musical numbers as Shion continues to break into song at a moment’s notice. The result of all of this wild genre-blending is an anime that really stands out. It is not like anything I’ve seen before, and the originality of the piece makes it a film that gets better and better as it goes.

Typically I recommend non-Japanese viewers of anime watch whatever version of a film they find most enjoyable, whether dubbed into English or dubbed in Japanese with English subtitles. In this case there is a clear quality difference between the two, where the English versions of the songs are simply not as good as the Japanese ones. It is ultimately the viewer’s choice, as it should be, but you will definitely be missing out.