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type_wildtl;dr watch them if you're a fan, but don't go to them if you want a taste of what the series are really about. This is Tsubasa on valium and xxxHolic on ACID.
Very briefly on the history of these films: This is a double feature which opened in cinemas in August 2005, which was early in the run of the Tsubasa anime and several months before the xxxHolic anime premiered. Clamp apparently weren't much involved in the production of either film, going by the credits. At any rate, the entire project seems weird - not the idea of a feature film of either, seeing that they sure as hell have both the worldbuilding and the cast ready for it - but to make it a double feature, and particularly the way they chose to do it. The xxxHolic film is an hour long and gets its thing done, but the Tsubasa one is 40 lousy minutes, and none of the good things about the manga gets to shine here. The animation is TV-quality (in Tsubasa's case) and the xxxHolic one, well... must be witnessed. So it's clearly not high-budget and clearly aimed solely at the existing fanbse, which for all I know this is a perfectly normal Japanese business model.
Storywise: Some Tsubasa Filler Episode full of OCs and a really boring Tomoyo. The worldbuilding is interesting, what with the bird and cage motifs, but there's no attempt to make this mean something MORE than cool backgrounds. Fay and Kurogane spend 80% of the film locked up in some cage, boo. Sakura is boring (what else is new), but I surprised myself by liking Syaoran. I'm pretty sure the villain is the AU version of some of the smirky Big Cimaron kings from KKM.
On the xxxHolic side of things, I dooo believe this was the point where somebody just wanted to take the whole magical realism angle and play it for all that it was worth. There is a lot of dwelling on pretty backgrounds that seem to be there only to be pretty, because it bizarrely does not bother ANYBODY to be walking around a starlit sky inside a house or anything. The film mostly feels very true to the series proper, but a big point of xxxHolic is that normal human beings - which is what Watanuki consider himself - are unaware of the workings of Yuko's world. In this story, though? They take it in stride, and it takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes before even poor Watanuki accepts the weirdness of the mansion as if he was a student of Ohtori Academy. On the positive side of things, this film gives us Yuuko being a BAMF like we all knew she could be, but never was in the series proper. Those are five glorious, glorious minutes.
The only real reason to watch either of these films would be if you really want an extra episode of the TV anime. Additionally, if you're more-than-averagely interested in animation as an artform, you might want to take a look at the xxxHolic one. The animation might be cheap and arguably dirt poor, but there's a lot of CGI that seems to be intentionally poor in order to achieve some kind of effect, and I find that really fascinating. I also really liked the music! (Tsubasa, from what I could tell, just re-used music from the TV anime, which is just as well since IIRC the music was the best part of it). On the technical side of things, the common thread binding these films together is an item aquired in Yuuko-verse than subsequently passed onto Syaoran to clean up the mess he's in. As such, it makes sense to watch the xxxHolic film before the Tsubasa one, yet the packaging of the DVD clearly puts the Tsubsasa one first. It's probably to do with the gap of popularity of the two, but it still kind of annoys me if that wasn't how it was originally shown.
What is interseting is where these films fit into canon. I mean, at least it's interesting if you're, um, me, and too into the details of adaptations going on here. There are three different iterations of the story:
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle (manga + OADs) / xxxHolic (manga + OADs) Shared universe
Tsubasa Chronicles (anime): Ends earlier than the manga. Yuuko's shop exists but none of the BS with poor Watanuki that the manga eventually introduced
xxxHolic + xxxHolic Kei (anime): Ends earlier than the manga. Syaoran & co never show up, and at least one storyline that originally crossed with Tsubasa is re-written to be contained within Watanuki's world.
We've got two comics so intertwined that major plot points rest on the places they cross, and two TV series that are independent of the comics and each other. The name makes it clear that the Tsubasa film here takes place in the anime!verse, not the manga and thus, not in the universe of the xxxHolic manga either. When we take into account that Watanuki never meets Syaoran-tachi in the xxxHolic anime, but DO see him in the film, we've just found a third xxxHolic universe - namely the one existing in the Tsubasa Chronicles anime and never before or since seen on its own.
Very briefly on the history of these films: This is a double feature which opened in cinemas in August 2005, which was early in the run of the Tsubasa anime and several months before the xxxHolic anime premiered. Clamp apparently weren't much involved in the production of either film, going by the credits. At any rate, the entire project seems weird - not the idea of a feature film of either, seeing that they sure as hell have both the worldbuilding and the cast ready for it - but to make it a double feature, and particularly the way they chose to do it. The xxxHolic film is an hour long and gets its thing done, but the Tsubasa one is 40 lousy minutes, and none of the good things about the manga gets to shine here. The animation is TV-quality (in Tsubasa's case) and the xxxHolic one, well... must be witnessed. So it's clearly not high-budget and clearly aimed solely at the existing fanbse, which for all I know this is a perfectly normal Japanese business model.
Storywise: Some Tsubasa Filler Episode full of OCs and a really boring Tomoyo. The worldbuilding is interesting, what with the bird and cage motifs, but there's no attempt to make this mean something MORE than cool backgrounds. Fay and Kurogane spend 80% of the film locked up in some cage, boo. Sakura is boring (what else is new), but I surprised myself by liking Syaoran. I'm pretty sure the villain is the AU version of some of the smirky Big Cimaron kings from KKM.
On the xxxHolic side of things, I dooo believe this was the point where somebody just wanted to take the whole magical realism angle and play it for all that it was worth. There is a lot of dwelling on pretty backgrounds that seem to be there only to be pretty, because it bizarrely does not bother ANYBODY to be walking around a starlit sky inside a house or anything. The film mostly feels very true to the series proper, but a big point of xxxHolic is that normal human beings - which is what Watanuki consider himself - are unaware of the workings of Yuko's world. In this story, though? They take it in stride, and it takes maybe ten or fifteen minutes before even poor Watanuki accepts the weirdness of the mansion as if he was a student of Ohtori Academy. On the positive side of things, this film gives us Yuuko being a BAMF like we all knew she could be, but never was in the series proper. Those are five glorious, glorious minutes.
The only real reason to watch either of these films would be if you really want an extra episode of the TV anime. Additionally, if you're more-than-averagely interested in animation as an artform, you might want to take a look at the xxxHolic one. The animation might be cheap and arguably dirt poor, but there's a lot of CGI that seems to be intentionally poor in order to achieve some kind of effect, and I find that really fascinating. I also really liked the music! (Tsubasa, from what I could tell, just re-used music from the TV anime, which is just as well since IIRC the music was the best part of it). On the technical side of things, the common thread binding these films together is an item aquired in Yuuko-verse than subsequently passed onto Syaoran to clean up the mess he's in. As such, it makes sense to watch the xxxHolic film before the Tsubasa one, yet the packaging of the DVD clearly puts the Tsubsasa one first. It's probably to do with the gap of popularity of the two, but it still kind of annoys me if that wasn't how it was originally shown.
What is interseting is where these films fit into canon. I mean, at least it's interesting if you're, um, me, and too into the details of adaptations going on here. There are three different iterations of the story:
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle (manga + OADs) / xxxHolic (manga + OADs) Shared universe
Tsubasa Chronicles (anime): Ends earlier than the manga. Yuuko's shop exists but none of the BS with poor Watanuki that the manga eventually introduced
xxxHolic + xxxHolic Kei (anime): Ends earlier than the manga. Syaoran & co never show up, and at least one storyline that originally crossed with Tsubasa is re-written to be contained within Watanuki's world.
We've got two comics so intertwined that major plot points rest on the places they cross, and two TV series that are independent of the comics and each other. The name makes it clear that the Tsubasa film here takes place in the anime!verse, not the manga and thus, not in the universe of the xxxHolic manga either. When we take into account that Watanuki never meets Syaoran-tachi in the xxxHolic anime, but DO see him in the film, we've just found a third xxxHolic universe - namely the one existing in the Tsubasa Chronicles anime and never before or since seen on its own.
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