Writer and Director: Atsuko Ishizuka
There is a strong American influence in narrative if not the animation style of new Japanese cartoon Goodbye Don Glees! released in cinema’s this week. With its wistful reflections on the character’s youth and a decisive coming-of-age theme, classic childhood adventure movies like The Goonies and those about teenage self-knowledge, set in endlessly sunny summers come together in Atsuko Ishizuka’s debut movie exploring rites of passage, grief and the deep bonds of friendship.
Friends Roma and Toto reunite as young adults, but their relationship is strained, remembering back to their 15-year-old selves and a cross-country adventure in search of some amateur drone footage that would prove they didn’t start a forest fire. Roma brings along the innocent Drop whose enthusiasm soon grates with Toto, especially when they get lost in the mountains, but is this their last great adventure?
It takes a little while for the various timelines, characters and fantasy sequences in Goodbye Don Glees! to settle and for the audience to make sense of Ishizuka’s overarching vision, but once it does this 90-minute animation proves an interesting and warm study of male friendship and the external pressures placed on these boys to succeed, or, at least, find their path. Eventually, we work out that the Don Glees of the title is a club of sorts that the boys belonged to centred around a wooden fort in the woods and the title asks whether these characters need to say goodbye to who they once were in order to grow up.
There is a real emphasis on the natural world in this film, both as the basis and location for the group’s navigation adventure through rural landscapes but also as a place of escape from the urban grittiness of Tokyo that brings with it another, less fulfilling lifestyle. Nature is also a place of fantasy and fulfilment, particularly through the character of Drop whose love of Iceland takes him on search of “treasures” and dramatically beautiful waterfalls. That the ultimate message is about the charm of the natural world and its exploration emerges nicely within the story.
Ishizuka’s animation will be familiar from 80s and 90s graphic and manga styles that look timeless and nicely eschew the over-produced computer graphics of more contemporary techniques that better suit the wistful memory-laden approach taken in the story. It gives the characters far more expression and emotional range too – voiced by Natsuki Hanae as Roma, Yûki Kaji as Toto and Ayumu Murase as Drop – that draw the viewing into their cherished relationships.
Ishizuka doesn’t always draw clear distinctions between memory, imagination and reality but the cumulative effect of Goodbye Don Glees! is engaging, certainly referencing all those American movies about the last days of childhood and the meaningful adventures between friends before the adult world claims them.
Goodbye Don Glees! is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 30 November.
