I don’t know where to even start with this one. I can’t even call the GoHands thing the elephant in the room, because it pretty much is the room. But then, we’re also talking about a manga I really love. Not at the BokuYaba level, but pretty darn high in the next tier. Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta is a sweet, wonderful entry in the booming middle school romcom genre by Fujichika Koume (also the mangaka of Tonari no Onsee-san ga Suki, which I just did an “Enzo Loves Manga” video on). If it had done by anything resembling a normal studio, it would be high on my expectations list and a slam dunk to cover.
GoHands is about as far from that as you can get, of course. I can’t help but think on how they and Naz provide a real Yin-Yang of anime awfulness. Naz is completely devoid of creativity, style, or basic competence. It’s like anime drawn and directed by a repurposed bot originally designed to assemble box cutters. What they did to Hoshi no Samidare is truly remarkable – take a surpassingly vibrant and imaginative manga and turn it into something utterly turgid, lifeless, and generic. But then you have GoHands, who when they aren’t plagarizing are obsessed with the notion of their own avant-garde cleverness, when in fact what they think of as style is truly ghastly.
Maybe it’s a function of just how low my expectations were, but I’ll say this much – I didn’t find this premiere as abysmal and depressing as the Biscuit Hammer one (and everything that followed it). Don’t get me wrong – when this was bad, it was really biblical. Those first five minutes were beyond the pale, some of the weirdest, most misguided, and ugly animation I’ve ever seen. But after that it was almost- well, I won’t say “normal”, but it could almost have passed for real anime. Maybe having a director (Kudo Susumu) with a long pre-GoHands resume is responsible for that.
What I think about is, who decides this is a good idea? This happens over and over with GoHands, and the derision rains down on them. But they keep doing it – does that mean that inside the building, they believe this kind of malfeasance is actually good? Is there no one at any step of the process to step up and say “For the love of God, just stop!”? I mean, is it really possible someone to look at that freakshow of an opening sequence and not realize it’s a crime against humanity?
Again, this is all happening with a manga I really, really like a lot. Once that disastrous intro was over it was almost possible to get into the flow of the story a little. And I suspect even if this weren’t such a clusterfuck, there would still be some viewers turned off by the premise (there certainly were with the manga). The hero here is Komura Kaede (Itou Masahiro), a sweet-natured middle schooler with a serious crush on his seatmate, Mie Ai (Wakayama Shion). The hook with Ai is that she’s blind as a bat without her glasses – and she forgets them a lot. This creates both crisis and opportunity for Kaede, as Ai’s sense of personal space goes out the window when she’s visually unaided.
I don’t want to go down the whole manga spoiler road, but I’ll say this. If you aren’t so turned off by the visuals as to bail immediately, don’t judge the series by the first episode. It can come off as a one-trick pony at first, but trust me, there’s a lot more to it – and the main relationship – than the glasses gimmick. It seems absurd that someone as helpless as Ai would forget her glasses so often, but that does get explored and explained. We learn a lot more about Ai and Kaede’s home life, and their character arcs are quite extensive, with a ton of development. The forgotten glasses are the pretext for much of the situation comedy (especially early on), but they’re not the actual crux of the story.
For me at least, both Ai and Kaede are adorable individually and collectively. And the premiere doesn’t totally blow it on getting some of their charms across. Once we get past that grisly opening (I would say “when the dust settles”, but it never really does), the character side is roughly okay. They actually did a pretty nice job with the facial expressions (including Ai’a squint) – though the hair stuff could be a little distracting – and the casting for the leads seems pretty on-point.
Of course, I’m not going to blame anyone for jumping ship – if I didn’t love the manga as much as I do I probably would myself. It kind of depends on what happens now – the level of St. Vitus’ Dance in the classroom sequences might just be tolerable, but if what we saw in the beginning recurs, that’s surely fatal. I’m hoping that was GoHands trying to show how GoHands they are, and now that it’s out of their system Kudo can keep things relatively same from now on. If so The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses might have a chance – the manga really is that good, and it pretty much never stops improving from the second chapter onwards.
Swelter
July 6, 2023 at 12:55 amI actually started feeling nauseous from all the panning and distorted field of view stuff. Baffling that they would do this.
Sander
July 6, 2023 at 6:22 amGoHands is a studio I watch just the first episode of most of their series from. They are all terrible, but at least they are terrible in their own unique and interesting way. Which is still better than many just utterly generic and boring series that I tend to drop after just a few grating minutes.
Guardian Enzo
July 6, 2023 at 6:28 amThat’s faint praise for sure.
I just wish they weren’t ruining a manga I really like.
Sander
July 6, 2023 at 8:25 amYeah, it makes you wonder why *anyone* would allow GoHands to adapt their material, you’d have to be pretty desperate. And then to think we get a double dose of GoHands this season, the other one also being an adaptation of a seemingly interesting manga that should even less fit their style. Not like anything would actually….
That said, I just watched less than two grating minutes of Yumemiru Danshi wa Genjitsushugisha, which was just plain bad and therefore a wast of those two minutes. I’d say that makes it even worse.
L0ken
July 6, 2023 at 8:50 amI found manga just fine after reading more then half of it, so Gohands quite hilarious and weird direction made me somewhat interested to check out the anime, though doubt I will stay for many episodes.To be fair, at Bokuyaba current chapter I also found to be much less engaged by the series, so maybe it just my fading interest in “middle school romcom” subgenre .
Rob Barrett
July 6, 2023 at 10:14 amWell, at least I got the manga out of this. Lovely strip, especially the slow build-up to the aquarium chapters.
Guardian Enzo
July 6, 2023 at 10:40 amIt is like BokuYaba in that way. Not as deep (or as good generally) but it does build consistently from the beginning, with real valleys. It just gets better. And that’s a quality I’m observing in Tonari no Onee-san as well.
Rob Barrett
July 6, 2023 at 12:05 pmI just caught up to the most recent chapter. It really is excellently paced. And I love the gag where we never see the parents’ faces. (Mie’s father is a hoot.)
Guardian Enzo
July 6, 2023 at 2:47 pmYeah, he’s awesome. I like Kaede’s mom too.
Folcwine P. Pywackett
July 6, 2023 at 10:46 pmDon’t know if I would classify the opening animation as “a crime against humanity” but it certainly caused me major vertigo. Who wants to watch a scene from the visual perspective of an ant? But on the other hand, the animation of Ai Mie’s hair was beautiful. What really set the negatives on fire for me was the character of Kaede Komura. OK, you have a crush, you don’t want to say the wrong thing to your crush so you hem and haw, and stumble over your words. But this kid ends up saying absolutely nothing and it’s all interior monologue. Teacher getting mad at her, and he cannot even shake her awake? Does Anime really believe that mid schooler males in Japan are milk toast? Still there was enough there for me to stay with “The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses” especially if the Guardian says the source story is good!
Guardian Enzo
July 7, 2023 at 6:52 amIMHO yes, it’s very good. And Kaede is a great character. Not every series starts with its cast fully formed.
Brian Guy
July 11, 2023 at 12:17 amKeep in mind with Kaede that he’s sort of a young thirteen, obviously an innocent and just as obviously reluctant to stand out. Without elaborating, I promise all this has a story basis and you’ll come to understand what makes him tick in due course.
Simone
July 7, 2023 at 1:26 amIt’s amazing how there’s a variety of reactions to anime premieres that can be usually seen, ranging from admiration to disgust with a sleazy premise to boredom with overdone plot premises to derision towards incompetent production, but only GoHands manages to consistently elicit a completely different, unique feeling:
motion sickness.
Guardian Enzo
July 7, 2023 at 6:50 amI did wonder if Dramamine was a sponsor.
Kitsune
July 8, 2023 at 5:25 pmWell I guess you still took offense even when I specifically apologized in case I said too much and also made it very clear I respect you and your blog but I guess there’s not much I can do if you still felt offended by my opinion. Back to lurking I guess. If you were offended because I haven’t previously made positive comments here and started with negative then that’s because I try not to comment at all because of personal reasons I won’t bore you with. It’s just that this time you really made a mountain out of a molehill and I couldn’t keep quiet.
Guardian Enzo
July 8, 2023 at 5:35 pmYou know, if you’ve never posted to the site before sometimes comments (especially long ones) get flagged as spam and I never see them.
Kitsune
July 9, 2023 at 2:22 pmSure I can expect it could go to spam but not that this means you never ever see it. Like I get plenty of spam via email but I still look it over regularly because sometimes useful email gets caught there. I guess with blog comments you don’t have to worry about missing something really important but it was still unexpected you have it set up this way. Well this below is what I said, I still had it in my editing temp file.
I’m a lurker here and I respect you and your blog a lot but I have to say sometimes you can be a real whiner. I read your review before I watched this episode so I was expecting to see something terrible but it wasn’t anything like that. What’s the big deal with that opening part to rant about it so much? Aside from the weird perspective on those couple of up the leg shots it wasn’t bad at all, very far from making me turn off the whole anime. I was actually impressed how much background character movement they bothered to include. This is much better than when everyone besides the leads is a motionless dummy like we see it done all the time with crowded scenes. I’d much rather have companies use CG for dynamic scenes than overwork underpaid animators for the sake of “purity” of hand drawn to get the same level of movement. Honestly the problem I had with this anime was that the characters were pretty inane and boring. Since you say there’s going to be good character development later I guess I’ll keep watching but I wasn’t very impressed. Well the glasses girl looks cute but aside from that not much interest in her so far. I’m sorry if I’ve said too much but it irks me when I see people flying off the handle over something that turns out isn’t a big deal at all.
Collectr
July 8, 2023 at 9:17 pmGoHands manages to offend twice this season, because the opening of The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today has the same swooping, vertiginous shots and strange angles. It makes no sense. With standard camera angles, the CGI of the train, cars, street scenes, sky at sunrise, etc would be passable. Once the story started, the show looked almost normal (almost), except that the strange angles were inserted gratuitously at various times, almost to guarantee that the viewer wouldn’t pay attention to the silly plot. I got further this time (around 10 minutes versus 5 for Glasses), but that’s only because I like cats.
Guardian Enzo
July 8, 2023 at 9:58 pmI bailed on that about halfway, more because I was bored than the loopy visuals.
lHyDrAl
July 8, 2023 at 11:58 pmMaybe I’m crazy, but I quite like the look of the show. The reaction to the intro sequence seems a bit overblown to me with it only lasting about 3 minutes but it seems to be a love it or hate it situation. Based off of how much Fujichika Koume was tweeting during the episode it seems at the very least she’s happy with the adaptation. I’ll definitely be keeping up with this one.