https://v.animethemes.moe/SukiNaKoOP1. Video includes audio. Be sure to unmute Theres an old sentiment that gets repeated when it comes to consuming art everyone is entitled to their own interpretations and opinions. In the pure abstract this is true but its also true that media sometimes requires us to lean more towards certain takeaways than others. I highly doubt anyone would watch Girls und Panzer and come away with the sense that it was critiquing Soviet Union sociopolitical dogmatismthough I would love to see someone actually try arguing that in earnestor that serial experiments lain was just everyone tripping balls on LSD and that all that stuff about the Wired was just a druginduced hallucination. Yet every once in a great while there comes a property that either in its material as written or its presentation as shown is a genuine Rorschach inkblot test. How you end up seeing it says more about you than it does about the art itself or to put this into more contextuallyrelevant terms more about you as a viewer than it does about the studio that made it. Enter The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses a show whose trailer quickly became the recurring conversation in the leadup to the Summer 2023 anime season. Even before a single episode had aired everyone seemed to map a feeling onto it. It looks like garbage one would say. It looks awesome another would chime. It looks like awesome garbage shouted a third person. The truth is that all three are correct because studio GoHands managed to create a show that would be impossible to disappoint providing an endless stream of frustration for its detractors who saw it as nothing but drudge comfort food for those who wanted something free and easy with its romantic comedy and hilarity for those who wanted to see the most extra presentation for shockingly mundane material. https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/4b64c94d78447623229014901e033838.mp4 The opening animation already sets up the crazed chaotic nature of the visual storytelling with bewildering perspective and aggressive compositing being a fixture of the experience And the material certainly is that. Caught within the whirlwind of young infatuation Komura Kaede is smitten with his nextdoor seat neighbor Mie Ai. Though not the smartest student or the most athletically gifted Komura cannot help but find her adorable and with that many individual strands of anime hair who could blame him?. One day however Mie ends up forgetting her glasses leaving her to rely on Komura for the present situation. From there the shows vignettes follow a familiar cycle of Mie forgetting her glasses back at home and Komura being right there to either help her navigate when she can barely see or try and make headsortails of the myriad situations that cause his emotions to catch on fire. All the while others are keen to weigh in on the plainly obvious budding relationship unfolding. Azuma the classs cool dude makes it plain that he finds Komuras attraction to Mie amusing and secretly cheers him on while Komeya takes every chance possible to ask Komura if hes kissed Mie yet and so forth. 550https://i.ur.com/Or2bvnl.png The secondary characters quickly catch on to Komura and Mies dynamic coyly saying or doing things that gently nudge them towards the ultimate endgoal of the material Like the innumerable romcoms before it The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses banks on delaying any sense of confession or upfront emotional confrontation between its two characters to pad out the material and indulge in silliness and hijinks. Under normal circumstances there is nothing here to tilt ones head except that because the characters in question are in middle school it makes a little more sense why they arent quite so forthcoming about their own feelings. But the presence of GoHandss overthetop form of presentation does change the manner by which the material presents itself tonally. Because everything visually is so absurdly elevated to overcompensated degrees everything within the written material is given a heightened sense of ridiculousness even when a situation itself is completely runofthemill. On the surface it reads as a kind of cinemanarrative dissonance https://en.everybodywiki.com/Cinemanarrativedissonance the mundane story of the text does not match the insane story of the visuals. In a film textbook this might be framed as a death sentence for The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses it is the essential ingredient to fueling most reactions towards it positive or negative. There is absolutely no reason why Mies hair should flap around like it has a life of its own when the window isnt open or the sound to go insane when she says something that makes Komuras heart almost explode especially when a situation just doesnt call for it. Perhaps it could be said that the visual styling for The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is to somehow recreate the way in which Komura sees the world. His thoughts concerning Mie almost cause his brain to shortcircuit in realtime and we become privy to his wigging out by gazing into the abyss of weird body proportions camera angles and aggressive effects. It is as though his mind constructs reality like the mirrors in a funhouse. That might be amusing for an attempt to find compositional harmony within this series especially when confounded by questions that seem tailormade to address something amiss in cinematography. https://ur.com/KOveXA2.mp4 But buried underneath an endeavor like that is something far more cosmically eyerolling the question of why is this like this of all the pieces of media GoHands could have given this treatment to they gave it to something this plain? Even Hand Shakers perhaps GoHandss mostinfamous and wellknown property could offer the excuse of being a battle fantasy. It seems almost like a joke but one that insists on treating it like a serious artistic decision all the while you cant escape the sense that its constantly winking at you to let you know that its aware its trying way too hard and still occasionally failing outright. https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/cb0d3b8e8612b8070204f85d0659bd37.mp4 https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/ff68dff50360c343623e85377a87ad54.mp4 The original key animations / genga for the infamous sequence from the trailer animated by Okubo Hiroshi and how it looks within the finished product. The animation is a triumph not because of how good it is but because with the storyboarding compositing its a miracle this was ever completed. Note also how in the completed cut during the final seconds Komura enters the frame on the right not from the edge of the screen but just appears instead The experience is too surreal to cleanly summarize frankly. I do not know who decided that The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses must look this way but I find myself not caring to want to know either. All I do know is that in the moments where Komura manages to actually score some genuine points like being willing to lie to Mies mom because he doesnt want Mie to face her disappointment or skimping out on a day at the arcade with his friends because hes worried Mie wont find the post office I was having a blast watching it all unfold in its preposterouslypresented glory. Even though not every frames a stupefying painting there were plenty and because of that I couldnt help but laugh at jokes Id never find funny otherwise or find myself cheering for characters whose actions Id shake my head at. Point being The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is a showcase of GoHands putting in not 100 but a very particular kind of 100 that offers an endless supply of whatthefuckery for those who see it that way. When American film critic Pauline Kael wrote in Harpers Magazine in 1969https://web.archive.org/web/20170719153532/http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/trashartandthemovies.html movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them she could only dream of a show like this. What a beautiful medium anime is isnt it? 550https://i.ur.com/toMNQOC.gif