Goodbye, Don Glees!: a bittersweet anime that leans heavily into schmaltz

The second feature film by director Ishizuka Atsuko, Goodbye, Don Glees! channels the bittersweet memories of young friendship and adventure of Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986), with some of the visual hallmarks and wanderlust of Ishizuka’s 2018 anime travelogue series A Place Further than the Universe. Following an enigmatic framing device in which small-town teenagers Roma and Toto are observing a burning bonfire – a fire whose tragic resonance becomes apparent later – we rewind a few months, to simpler times, where we spend most of the film. Roma narrates in past tense over imagery of his being mocked for the manure-shovelling that is his daily lot as a farmers’ son. He and his friends Toto and Drop (the English translation of the Japanese name, Shizuku) comprise the small club the ‘Don Glees’; together they embark on little adventures. But they’re heading in separate directions: Roma pines after long-distance high-school sweetheart Tivoli, Toto frets about leaving behind childish things, while Drop talks cryptically about wanting to find their ‘treasure’, which will give their life meaning.

Enhanced by lively voice performances, Ishizuka’s character animation contains plenty of entertaining slapstick, as the boys blunder through failures at survivalism and attempts to make themselves look good in front of their peers. Ishizuka also playfully uses the teens’ subjectivity to manipulate the audience, such as a tumble over a ‘waterfall’ that turns out to be a gentle slope. Goodbye, Don Glees! is never less than pleasant to look at, and is best at its most ethereal – through luminous, warmly lit landscapes, roads submerged in flooded valleys, or a hazy red telephone box in an improbable location, connecting two sides of the world. There’s genuine majesty in Okamoto Ayano’s art direction and Kawashita Yuki’s camerawork, which presents the natural world on an overwhelmingly large scale, stretching beyond the human eye’s field of view. In such moments, Goodbye, Don Glees! feels like a film you can get lost in, a testament to Ishizuka’s compelling visual instincts.

There’s a wistful nostalgia to the gang’s capers over a lazy summer in an isolated country town, but, though the character work is generally compelling, the film often tips over into schmaltz. Various syrupy needle drops test the patience, while various coincidences and twists of fate begin to pile up into ridiculous contrivance. There’s not an ounce of cynicism to be found here, and the whole thing feels goofily earnest even by the standards of anime dramas. Goodbye, Don Glees! emulates its teenagers, in a sense – slightly embarrassing one minute, before stumbling upon profundity the next.

► Goodbye, Don Glees! is in UK cinemas now.