Anime Movie Goodbye Don Glees! Leaves A Pretty, But Unsatisfying Impression

For just three days in late September, the distributor GKIDS brought the new anime movie Goodbye, Don Glees! to theaters in the U.S. The movie is the first feature film by writer and director Atsuko Ishizuka, who directed the excellent anime series A Place Further Than The Universe. Below is my short, mostly spoiler-free review of the movie, for when it hits some streaming platform in the future.

The movie is a coming-of-age story about three high school boys who are for various reasons not connected to the popular groups of kids. The main character is Roma, shunned because as a farm boy he often smells of manure. His best friend since grade school is Toto, a bit of a nervous know-it-all, who leaves to spend his first two years in high school in Tokyo. In those years, Roma has made a new friend, Drop, a short, blonde kid with an unflagging positive disposition.

The story brings them all back together and takes them through an adventure to find Roma’s brand-new drone that crashed into the forested mountains, and during that trip they become even closer friends, learning about each other and the greater world around them.

In that sense, Goodbye, Don Glees! is similar to A Place Further Than The Universe. Both feature young people growing together as friends through an adventure. Both also share solid character writing, although the series was written by the insanely prolific Jukki Hanada (Chobits, Steins;Gate, No Game, No Life and nearly all the Love Live series), not Ishizuka. And both the movie and the series come from studio Madhouse.

Even more so than A Place Further Than The Universe, the movie Goodbye, Don Glees! is loaded with stunningly beautiful backgrounds with fluid and gorgeous animation. That is undoubtedly due to having a movie-size budget, and if so, it shows in nearly every frame.

So, with good character writing, beautiful art and solid animation, why am I left with an overall “meh” impression?

I think it is because Goodbye, Don Glees! doesn’t completely pull off being the type of film it sets out to be. It is in the category called “magical realism,” similar to (but not in any way narratively similar to) the wonderful movie Your Name. I can’t say why it doesn’t work as well in Don Glees! without somewhat spoiling the movie, so I will simply say the problem is that the magical aspect of Your Name is core to the entire movie, and that isn’t the case for Goodbye, Don Glees!

Overall, if you are in the mood for a slow-paced, emotional coming-of-age story that looks gorgeous, you could do worse things with your 98 minutes. But you could also watch even better anime movies.

I give Goodbye, Don Glees! (Madhouse, PG, 98 mins) a 6 out 10.

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