Tag: Studio GoHands

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Battle Girl Acid Ramen – What Even Is MOMENTARY LILY?

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

This show should not exist.

Let me be clear about something, that’s not a qualitative judgement. I’m pretty happy that Momentary Lily does exist, but it really shouldn’t.

There are many reasons why it shouldn’t. Point 1: the relevance of the relatively short-lived battle girl genre, the post-mahou shoujo warrior anime defined by Symphogear, ended when Symphogear XV concluded, with the only real aftershock of even marginal note being Assault Lily Bouquet—no relation—and honestly that’s being generous with the word “marginal.” Point 2: there is an agreed-upon, rough template for opening an action series. That template very much is not “huge cool fight, long sequence where a new girl meets the rest of the protagonists and cooks them food, second cool fight,” which is how this first episode is structured. Both of these points can be explained, though, by Point 3: Momentary Lily comes to us from GoHands mindbender-in-chief Suzuki Shingo and his fellow GH lifers Kudou Susumu and Yokomine Katsumasa. GoHands, for better or worse, seem to exist in active defiance of God, the natural order, and everything else under heaven and earth. Love them or hate them, the studio and its house style are a true one of one, nothing else looks like this, and in its best moments, their work can be genuinely stunning.

For some of their work, that’s an active detriment. At the end of the day, The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, despite its iffy characterization in its premiere episode, was a pretty normal romance series. There is no real reason the anime should’ve looked how it did, and GoHands’ attempts to restrain themselves to produce a “standard” TV anime benefits no one. Momentary Lily, though, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Based on nothing and beholden to no one, this is an original work, precisely from whose mind is hard to say, but it’s worth noting that Yanagi Tamazou, the main scriptwriter of Hand Shakers and Scar on the Praeter—both of which are prior GoHands attempts at action anime—is credited with that role here, so perhaps it was them. Or maybe it was someone else. Or maybe Momentary Lily is adapted from a pair of stone tablets that Suzuki Shingo brought down from a mountaintop after a religious experience. Honestly, nothing would be surprising. If it’s not overwhelmingly, abundantly clear from everything I just said, this show is fucking weird. Excitingly, it’s poised to get weirder.

As with everything this studio has ever touched, the visuals are the obvious standout point of discussion, but we should make some attempt to get at least the very broad strokes of the plot nailed down. The show isn’t exactly Finnegan’s Wake or anything, but the fighting game combo juggling approach to storytelling, including the characters sometimes stepping on each others’ lines, does mean a bit untangling is required to suss out what’s actually going on here. Very basically, in a near-future Japan, a horde of extradimensional machines that our protagonists call Wild Hunts appear. They can make people vanish into thin air simply by being near them, so predictably, this promptly wipes out most human life on the island and, quite possibly, in the world in general. Our protagonists, are a group of teenage girls; leader Yui [Abe Natsuko, in what seems to be her first role of any real note], self-proclaimed big sister-type who seems to have shoved water balloons down her chest Erika [Sakuragi Tsugumi, in what seems to be her literal first role at all], honorary green Precure / gamer girl Hinageshi [Wakayama Shion, killing it as always], pink cutie and fashionista Sazanka [Kuno Misaki], and the raven-haired, chuuni-stoic Ayame [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. Through means as of yet undisclosed, they have access to powerful weapons / very shiny CGI assets that they can use to fight back against and destroy these creatures. The episode opens, after a short conversation about eczema (naturally), with one of these fights.

After that, though, it promptly introduces another teenage girl, Kasumi Renge [Murakami Manatsu], amnesiac and having been wandering on her own for some time. After managing to momentar-lily overcome her incredible shyness—also placing this show at least adjacent to the Bocchi-core “anxious girls learning to make friends” genre—she promptly cooks them a bunch of food, styled as a cooking segment in a slice of life show. Then, the Wild Hunts attack again, and we get another battle, where it’s revealed that Kasumi also has a weapon and that hers, furthermore, is self-propelling, a truly awesome-looking pink guitar rocket skateboard thing. She proceeds to wipe out the Wild Hunts that are attacking her and her new friends. Roll credits.

This loses something in the retelling, even more than is the case for most anime I cover here. It is hard to describe, let alone capture, GoHands’ pure eye-bombing when they’re at the peak of their powers as they are here. The action sequences are genuinely very good, but they require putting yourself in a different headspace than is usual for action anime (I do have a few complaints, mostly relating to a shakycam segment early on, but all told this might be the most cogent a GoHands production has looked this decade). To put it mildly, the show’s visual aspects are an acquired taste, and there is still the odd stylistic quirk I can’t quite get over (the spaghetti hair, threadlike and infinite, that covers every character’s head, must truly be seen to be believed), but I think the studio’s staff acquit themselves nicely here, and I’m hoping it can keep up the polish.

As for the writing? So far it’s honestly too inscrutable to make many strong claims in that direction yet, aside from the observation that like previous GoHands originals, the show seems to somewhat haphazardly pull from mythology for show concepts (the weapons all seem to be named after things from Norse myth). But the characters, simple though they are, are mostly pretty fun, and are thus the real script highlight so far. I’m particularly fond of leader Yui’s can-do attitude, Ayame’s broodiness, and Hinageshi’s whole epic gamer girl shtick. The dialogue also has a bent, catchphrase-laden quality that I’m betting will prove as or more polarizing as the show’s visual elements. Personally I find it charming, but I can imagine someone who’s not myself getting sick of the bam! bam! vocal ticcing very quickly. The overall plot promises to evolve in unpredictably strange directions as well, with the preview for next week’s episode indicating that Erika will face mortal peril and, presumably, be rescued by her comrades.

Is this a must watch or anything? I’m not sure I’d say that, but if you like anime that are decidedly different from the norm it’s probably at least worth checking out. My own opinions on GoHands have evolved a lot since I last wrote about them, partly due to conversations with a friend1 who is a big fan of the studio’s work and partly just because, honestly, anything that stands out against the constant deluge of isekai and 6/10 romcoms is nice. Still, go into Momentary Lily with an open mind, and you might just find something worth going to bat for.

1: Hi May.

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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: What The Hell is Going in With THE GIRL I LIKE FORGOT HER GLASSES?

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

I’ve had nightmares about having to cover these guys.

Far more important than the actual anime we’re covering today, The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, is the studio that’s making it. This is a production by the infamous GoHands. The things they make are identifiably still anime, but they sit far outside of established visual norms; in terms of shot composition, basic directing and storyboarding, etc., that to see them in motion is to see what an anime produced in a another universe might look like. I am not, as many people in my position have, going to sit here and tell you that their shows necessarily look outright bad. I think GoHands’ work really falls outside of the good/bad dichotomy. But what it certainly, undeniably is, is confusing. Theirs is a ludicrous, extravagantly gaudy approach to fairly humdrum material that I cannot readily compare to any single other anime studio, except to say that if you imagine what would happen if Kyoto Animation decided to collectively drop an absolute ton of acid, you might get close.

There is so much that is just absolutely insane about how they approach the entire visual angle of their work, and people who study animation as a medium much more deeply than I do have written extensively on their many baffling decisions. Camera angles for instance; it’s obvious, but it’s worth repeating; in anime, there is no physical “camera.” Every single frame is drawn from an imaginary point of view, and there is absolutely no reason you cannot put the “camera” anywhere you want. In spite of this, there is ample literature describing best practices for where to focus your audience’s attention. Anime does this in a variety of ways, some common to all popular cinema and some unique to the medium itself, and GoHands boldly defies almost all of them. In terms of angles, the opening few minutes of Glasses Girl alone see Us, The Viewer, dragged along behind the protagonist’s feet as he walks to school, looking up at him at such an extreme angle that it makes him appear to have downright CLAMP-ian leg proportions.

In addition, GoHands completely disregards the entire general principle of limited animation. Their work, and especially Glasses Girl here, is absolutely bursting at the seams with extraneous motion. When our lead imagines the titular Glasses Girl walking to school with him, it seems like every single hair on her head is individually animated blowing in an imaginary wind. Background characters, who contribute nothing to the story directly, are given the full attention of the animation team. This has the interesting effect of making the main character, our usual everyman protagonist, actually feel exactly as important as every other character on screen—that is to say, not very important at all—and it’s from this kind of thing that you can sort of understand why GoHands, in addition to being widely reviled, also have a cult following. And hey, their stuff does look pretty good. As stills.

If you’re the sort of person who, like me, is constantly depressed by the general state of anime production, and how in recent years it’s led to even the best anime generally having at least one or two episodes that just look visibly unfinished, you will not really know what to make, at first, of a show that seems to have the opposite problem. But the fact remains that there is so much goddamn visual spaghetti on-screen at any given time in Glasses Girl that it’s hard to actually focus on anything.

If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time discussing the actual animation and not the story, that’s because there’s not a ton to say on that front. The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is another entry in the girl-with-a-gimmick romcom subgenre like, say, My Dress-Up Darling or any number of others. I tend to be pretty mixed on these anime at the best of times, and most of the good ones get by on visual chops. (Not to mention, “she wears glasses” is pretty damn weak as far as the central charm point for these things goes, especially since the show’s very premise requires her to not wear them most of the time. Not as weak as Shikimori from that show being nebulously ‘cool,’ but still.) So to that end, GoHands actually sort of has the right idea here. The notion is to make you feel the strength of the characters’ love via visual metaphor rather than necessarily needing to write them particularly strongly. After all, even a simple teenage crush can feel enormous when it’s your first one. And to their credit GoHands do pull off some appropriate tricks here; a huge swarm of blooming cherry blossom petals in the opening being the most obvious.

But fundamentally, the series has an unshakeable air of total derangement that feels comparable not to any other anime but, really, only to total amateur fiction. Glasses Girl‘s real compatriots are indie doujins and the like, not anything else airing this season. (Other than perhaps The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today, another GoHands show that premieres in a few days.) Any attempt at earnest depictions of romance falls apart under the fact that in addition to the series’ wobbly, loopy visuals, it’s also pretty badly-written. Main character Kaede Komura [Masahiro Itou] spends most of the episode monologuing about how down bad he is for the female lead, Ai Mie [Shion Wakayama]. Which would itself be forgivable if anything he had to say was remotely interesting instead of just vaguely creepy drivel, but it isn’t. The attempts at humor are mostly not worth mentioning, although the series does occasionally manage a passingly funny gag. If I could compare the combination of bizarre visual choices, faintly skeezy atmosphere, and downright upsetting attempts at selling the “chemistry” of the leads to any other anime, it might be Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, which long-time readers will know is not a compliment.

Through the bizarre monologuing, offputting atmosphere, and overuse of fisheye effects, it’s hard to imagine who the target audience for this thing actually is, other than GoHands’ own small cult of devotees. (Even then, the moments of true visual weirdness, such as when Kaede and Ai are chroma-keyed into a heavily filtered CGI forest, are few and far enough between that I’m not sure bad-anime rubberneckers will be interested either. Although there is an abundance of truly bizarre camera choices on otherwise mundane shots, for certain.)

Nonetheless, it’s hard to actively dislike Glasses Girl. There’s just too much that is too far removed from the norm to make it worth that, and it’s worth at least acknowledging that the bizarre disjunction every part of this show has from every other part can at least produce an interesting accidental-denpa effect. No, save your vitriol for shows that are actually offensive or are so badly kneecapped by the production bubble that they’re ruined. Real cases of potential squandered, not whatever’s going on here. At the same time, l can’t find it within me to become a true GoHands defender, either, and I did have some outside hope that maybe this show would accomplish that. But, it is what it is. Some things are simply not made for you and me.

And, well, it’s at least still more authentically weird than Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon, which I will not be covering here on Magic Planet Anime. So that’s something.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.