Goodbye, Don Glees!
Feb. 1st, 2023 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingGoodbye, Don Glees! (available on YouTube) is a 2022 big-budget anime movie directed by Atsuko Ishizuka, a female animator and storyboard artist who has worked with Madhouse for almost twenty years. The movie is supposed to be a bittersweet comedy about three high-school kids going on a short mountain adventure over summer break, but the tone is weird.
Because its story and characters are completely original, I would have liked the movie to start with the basics: Who, what, when, where. Maybe I’m just a stupid dumb-dumb, but I had a lot of trouble understanding who the characters were supposed to be, where they lived, and how they knew each other. About an hour into the movie, I had to pause the video to read the plot summary on Wikipedia, because I had no clue what was going on.
I don’t think the movie is supposed to be fragmented or difficult to understand; I just think the narrative structure is slightly mishandled. Since I didn’t understand the relationship between the characters, I had trouble understanding why the movie wanted me to have big feelings about them, and the overblown teenage-boy anime speeches they delivered every seven or eight minutes felt very jarring.
On top of that, the animation itself is jerky to the point of being (unintentionally) nausea-inducing. I’m not sure why the animation quality is so bad, especially considering that every third or fourth scene has an overt product placement. Like, how do you feel about Coca-Cola, son? Have you considered that a refreshing bottle of Coke® could enhance your precious summer memories?
Even though it’s not animated well, the movie’s art is lovely, especially during the scenes of the kids riding their bikes through the forest. Also, even though the overall plot makes no sense, there are maybe three or four good scenes that are surprising and genuinely delightful to watch.
I think a fair comparison is Mamoru Hosoda’s recent movie Belle, which also has three or four good scenes but is, for the rest of its running time, kind of painful to watch. Depending on how and why you watch movies, maybe those scenes are worth it, and maybe they’re not.
I should add that Goodbye, Don Glees! has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I would hazard a guess that this is because it’s about a mixed-race kid with cancer. You don’t figure this out until about ten minutes before the end, so… Sorry for spoiling it? Idk, this doesn’t seem like something that should be a spoiler; it’s just that the movie doesn’t explain itself well. Anyway, I guess nobody wants to be the heartless asshole who writes a review saying that a Japanese movie with a female director about a mixed-race kid with cancer just isn’t very good.
I’m going to say that Goodbye, Don Glees! is a solid 5/10 movie. It’s not offensive, but it’s not particularly memorable. For me personally, I’d give it a pass in favor of The House of the Lost on the Cape (available on YouTube here), another anime movie with similar themes that came out at around the same time and is actually fun to watch.
Because its story and characters are completely original, I would have liked the movie to start with the basics: Who, what, when, where. Maybe I’m just a stupid dumb-dumb, but I had a lot of trouble understanding who the characters were supposed to be, where they lived, and how they knew each other. About an hour into the movie, I had to pause the video to read the plot summary on Wikipedia, because I had no clue what was going on.
I don’t think the movie is supposed to be fragmented or difficult to understand; I just think the narrative structure is slightly mishandled. Since I didn’t understand the relationship between the characters, I had trouble understanding why the movie wanted me to have big feelings about them, and the overblown teenage-boy anime speeches they delivered every seven or eight minutes felt very jarring.
On top of that, the animation itself is jerky to the point of being (unintentionally) nausea-inducing. I’m not sure why the animation quality is so bad, especially considering that every third or fourth scene has an overt product placement. Like, how do you feel about Coca-Cola, son? Have you considered that a refreshing bottle of Coke® could enhance your precious summer memories?
Even though it’s not animated well, the movie’s art is lovely, especially during the scenes of the kids riding their bikes through the forest. Also, even though the overall plot makes no sense, there are maybe three or four good scenes that are surprising and genuinely delightful to watch.
I think a fair comparison is Mamoru Hosoda’s recent movie Belle, which also has three or four good scenes but is, for the rest of its running time, kind of painful to watch. Depending on how and why you watch movies, maybe those scenes are worth it, and maybe they’re not.
I should add that Goodbye, Don Glees! has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I would hazard a guess that this is because it’s about a mixed-race kid with cancer. You don’t figure this out until about ten minutes before the end, so… Sorry for spoiling it? Idk, this doesn’t seem like something that should be a spoiler; it’s just that the movie doesn’t explain itself well. Anyway, I guess nobody wants to be the heartless asshole who writes a review saying that a Japanese movie with a female director about a mixed-race kid with cancer just isn’t very good.
I’m going to say that Goodbye, Don Glees! is a solid 5/10 movie. It’s not offensive, but it’s not particularly memorable. For me personally, I’d give it a pass in favor of The House of the Lost on the Cape (available on YouTube here), another anime movie with similar themes that came out at around the same time and is actually fun to watch.
