Screenplay: Atsuko Ishizuka
Producers: Anjali Kunapaneni
Starring: Natauki Hanae, Yuki Kaji, Ayumu Murase
Year: 2022
Country: Japan
BBFC Certification: PG
Duration: 95 mins
Having seen the acclaim heaped upon Atsuko Ishizuka’s Goodbye, Don Glees!, I was excited to be offered the opportunity to review it. It seemed to play to my love of both animation and coming-of-age films, with more than one critic comparing it to Rob Reiner’s classic Stand by Me. The story follows the teenagers Toto and Roma, who are reunited when Toto returns from a year away at high school. Despite Toto’s reluctance, Roma excitedly declares their former club, oddly named The Don Glees, re-established and introduces a new member, a kid called Drop. When the three boys find themselves accused of starting a forest fire, they set off into the mountains to retrieve a drone they lost which they believe contains footage that will exonerate them.
With a trio of teenage outsider protagonists and a quest narrative with beautifully picturesque backdrops, the scene seems set for an exciting, fun and potentially moving adventure but Goodbye, Don Glees! actually emerges as a strange, maudlin, overwrought and undernourished film that pins a lot of hope on its increasingly emotionally manipulative story. I’m not above a bit of emotional manipulation and, in fact, as a rank sentimentalist I love it when it’s carried off well, but Goodbye, Don Glees! is a horrendous example of a strangely aggressive form of emotionalism that can often be found in Anime, in which the film practically grabs the viewer and wrings them out in an attempt to milk tears from their ducts. I’ve seen it done brilliantly in films like Anthem of the Heart, but I’ve also found it borderline distasteful in films like A Silent Voice. Just as characters that are supposed to be cute can become creepy if you push that too far, so Goodbye, Don Glees!’ attempts to make the heart swell tumble disastrously into ludicrous and ultimately sickening. By the final scene, it feels like two animators competing to see who can draw more tears on the characters’ already saltily-saturated cheeks.
Goodbye, Don Glees! is also tainted by a bizarre and crass sense of humour, epitomised by an early scene in which the boys dress up as women by putting on their sisters clothes and shoving balloons up their tops, a move that is intended to make them appear irresistible to their bullies and which somehow works. When it’s trying to be funny, the film switches into headlong slapstick mode, all flailing limbs and shrill yelling. This tonal imbalance ultimately makes the emotional side of the film even harder to buy into, and though the jarringly extreme turn the story takes in its third act was clearly planned from the outset, it still feels like a desperate attempt to claw back some investment in one fell swoop.
Although the artwork includes some very beautiful scenery, Goodbye, Don Glees! has an oddly muddy look to it, with the stilted animation overlaid on those backdrops robbing them of their appeal. The way in which the story ultimately goes has the cloying feel of those “Live, Laugh, Love” signs, never seeming sincere no matter how many animated tears cascade from the protagonists’ eyes. It’s hard to watch this sort of material when you feel absolutely nothing yourself. It makes you feel like a heartless cynic, which I hope I’m pretty far from being. Certainly, a few nights back I watched Mitchell Leisen’s To Each His Own and cried myself dry. I’m constantly open to being emotionally manipulated by the movies but there are different ways you can go about it. You can reach people’s hearts and minds by astutely identifying emotions and experiences that will resonate with them and placing them onscreen with a delicacy and respect for the feelings this will awaken. Or you can write “SAD” on the side of a dead fish and repeatedly slap the viewer round the face with it. Goodbye, Don Glees!’ approach, I’m sad to say, is pitifully piscine.
Goodbye, Don Glees! is released exclusively in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from 30th November 2022.
