The first half builds a world so visually alive that you forget you're watching a film made in 2006, every frame a painting of rust and green fighting for the same earth. Then it pivots hard into a love story wrapped in apocalypse, and the animation starts cutting corners just when the stakes demand they don't. What saves it is Agito's quiet conviction that even a girl bent on remaking the world deserves saving, not stopping, a gentleness that makes the steampunk collapse around them feel earned instead of convenient.

Three centuries ago, a failed genetic experiment on plants gave the world's forests a mind of their own, and their war on humankind left the planet in ruins. Agito, a boy living with his father in Neutral City, belongs to a village that keeps an uneasy truce with the neighboring forest. Deep in the woods he finds a girl asleep in a stasis machine and wakes her. She is Toola, who has slept for 300 years and holds the key to restoring the Earth. The high-tech town of Laguna, still at war with the forest, learns that she can activate a weapon her father built to wipe the forest out. Swayed by Shunack, a soldier from the old world, Toola goes with him despite Agito's warning. Agito then strikes a pact with the forest, drawing on its power to rescue her and to stop a weapon that could destroy both the forest and his home. The film blends adventure, drama, fantasy, romance and science fiction.