YMMV / The Rebirth of Buddha

• Anvilicious:
  • Suicide will not make your suffering stop, but worsen it; you'll screw yourself out of a proper reincarnation or afterlife in Heaven for wasting the life God gave you. For such a crime, you'll instead live on as an evil spirit for the remainder of your supposed lifespan, seeking to destroy and drag your loved ones and others who step into the place of your suicide down to Hell, where you'll also fall into once your remaining time is up.
  • People who claim to be Buddha reborn are lying to you and may be in cahoots with demons. Unless it's Ryuho Okawa, however, because he's the true reincarnation of the Buddha and you should worship him instead.
• Designated Hero: Sayako is meant to be a sweet girl who wants to do the right thing no matter what. For most of the movie, she is portrayed as such, but then in the climax she refuses to say Mr Arai is the real Buddha, loudly denouncing him on live TV even when Mr Arai threatens to blow up the stadium full of innocent civilians^note 50,000 of them, to be more specific if she keeps refusing. She goes as far as to agree their lives are worth less to her than her faith in Mr Sorano. This is meant to be a heroic action on her part.
• Epileptic Trees: It is largely believed that Mari Kimura is meant to be a reference to idol and actress Fumika Shimizu, who performed on stage and in various films and tv series until briefly retiring from the industry and announcing her membership of Happy Science in 2017^note  while the movie came out in 2009, Shimizu stated that she'd actually been a member since she was a young child and her parents joined, which would mean that Ryuko Okawa would indeed have known of her membership at the time. After this, she - much like Mari - began performing again but under her new group's label.
• Fridge Horror: The movie shows a suicide victim's spirit facing three judges for it and other bad deeds they did while living before being condemned back to Earth and waiting for their due time for condemnation in Hell. If you think about it more thoroughly, this means that even if the victim is a child or an adult going through a situation dire enough to die of suicide, such as Domestic Abuse or bullying, their spirit will be judged in a show trial for "wasting their one God-given life" and other "bad deeds" they may have done and therefore they'll have to wait for condemnation, which can be seen as a posthumous form of victim blaming.
• Glurge: Much like your standard Happy Science romp, it depicts its members and those sympathetic to the movement as noble people fighting for the greater good, while depicting those who oppose them as malicious scumbags or misguided people controlled by demons. The noticeable difference is that this movie is an anti-suicide tract, depicting suicide victims in an unflattering light as evil spirits who seek to wreak havoc, and that it's a huge Take That! to Aum Shinrikyo and its leader Shoko Asahara.
• Narm: Yuuki saves Sayako from being run over by a train and takes her to a coffee shop. When he asks her why did she try to kill herself, Sayako loudly proclaims she would never think about it, which makes this scene hard to take seriously.
  Yuuki: But, what made you wanna kill yourself?
  Sayako: (furious) I would never think of killing myself!
• Questionable Casting:
  • The usually hammy Takehito Koyasu voices the dull Ryuho Okawa stand-in for this movie, Taiyou Sorano. It isn't better in the English dub, where the equally-hammy Dan Green tries to do his best with what he's given.
  • Kotono Mitsuishi as Mari Kimura's voice. The idea of hearing a far-right cult's rhetoric spouted in the voice of Sailor Moon, whose series is hailed as feminist, is a deeply unsettling case of irony.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • In Mari Kimura's backstory, a scene featuring her with her theater company is overlaid with a "raining dollar bills" effect as she explains to Sayako that she incurred a debt while struggling to make ends meet.
  • The special effects for the powers used by both Arai and the demon possessing him in the Final Battle look obviously fake, making the situation harder to take seriously.
  • The CG female angels that appear around Taiyou Sorano before giving his final lecture for the movie look out of place, especially as they're depicted wearing transparent bodysuits with lace strategically placed on their "naughty bits".
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Tokuzo Kanemoto's spirit trial scene for taking his own life and being an atheist reeks of this for those who aren't Happy Science believers. The narrative tries to portray the late journalist as a smug, greedy jerk by having him rant about how the false report he made ruined his life and revealing he wrote derisive articles about God, religion, and the Spirit World. However, it's still hard not to feel sorry for the poor bastard as he's sent back to Earth as a spirit in waiting for condemnation, especially because he seemed eager to report the truth and the false report plunged him into rock bottom, thus making the spirit show trial cruelly redundant.

---