The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses

Komura-kun, a slightly shy middle school boy, has a crush on his bespectacled classmate, Mie-san, who sits beside him. He goes about his life, unable to bring himself to talk to this strangely charming girl. Three days into a new seating arrangement, Mie-san has forgotten her glasses again. Komura-kun tries his best to help her, but his heart starts racing uncontrollably when she gets up close to him to try to see.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is based on Koume Fujichika's The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses (Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta) manga. It streams on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

The opening minutes of The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses will undoubtedly live in infamy. The camera follows the main character, Kaede, in a swooping, low-angle tracking shot as he enters the school and monologues in his head about the girl he has a crush on. It is like a POV shot of some kind of small animal, say a cat or frog, that has somehow ended up trapped in the school and is trying to avoid being stepped on but can't seem to escape being underfoot. The color scheme has a strange tint that shifts from warm browns to cool blues and purples, often with a random gradient in the corners. The two-dimensional character fails to mesh with the three-dimensional backgrounds like you're running down the hall in a Danganronpa game. It's disorienting and nauseating and serves no narrative purpose – it has nothing to do with the story, the characters, or even the tone of the show. It's exactly what we've come to expect from GoHands, which has miraculously survived the cancellation of their Tokyo Babylon adaptation, much to my consternation.

Luckily, the camera calms down after a bit, and there are fewer pointless color gradients. Don't get me wrong; it doesn't even begin to approach looking good. The characters still look like they exist on a different plane of existence from the backgrounds, and the color palette settles on drab, warm browns. Mie's hair wiggles around disconcertingly like a time-lapse video of vines growing, looking for something to wrap around. However, now that it doesn't feel like a POV shot from the perspective of a small, frightened animal, we can settle in and focus on the story: a tepid romance with a central premise that seriously stretches credibility.

As someone who has spent the last decade-plus with a partner with terrible vision, there's a certain familiarity to the way Mie squints at people two feet away trying to recognize them, or can only read with her nose inches from the text. But then again, if she's used to navigating the world with glasses, her forgetting to put them on before leaving the house seems about as plausible as all those dreams I've had about realizing I've forgotten to get dressed before going to work. How did she even get to school without walking into traffic, Mr. Magoo-style?

I know it's all a gimmick that's not supposed to be totally realistic, but I'd be much more willing to go along with it if there was any chemistry to speak of. While Kaede and Mie don't quite reach the lows of My Tiny Senpai in terms of prosaicism, they don't have a whole lot of personality, either. Kaede is timid, and while Mie is supposedly a weirdo, that doesn't come through much. Other than the blindness gags, the comedy around having a poor sense of personal boundaries reminds me of Aharen-san wa Hakarenai, but that one had some unexpected gags that made me laugh out loud. Here, the jokes are repetitive and elicited little more than a shrug for me.

I know there's a market for gentle, inoffensive romcoms like The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, but I like my comedy a little sharper. Weak vision, weak writing, weak animation.

Plenty of studios have such a pedigree that nearly any project they work on will be regarded with at least some prestige and attention. You've got your ufotables, your MAPPAs, your WITs, and so on. Then, you have just as many studios that are either too small, too new or have too inconsistent a filmography to muster up much of any feeling at all. There are few studios I can think of, though, that can stop the heart and chill the blood simply by virtue of uttering their name. It takes an unholy degree of misplaced talent and effort to produce the kind of anime that is so heinous to look at that simply laying eyes on a single frame of one of their productions is enough to induce traumatic flashbacks and dissociative responses. GoHands is just such a studio, and this year they have seen fit to plague us with two premieres in a single season. The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is the first of them, and I can only hope to God that it is the worst of them because I don't know if I have the constitution to make it through another twenty minutes of this company's "house style."

It would only be fair to try and judge the story and characters as their own thing, separate from the terrible things that GoHands has decided to do to the material in adaptation. Unfortunately, I don't know if The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses will ever be a particularly great anime. It's no more or less than a minor variation on the popular "Bewilderingly average young boy falls in love with a girl in class, only there's some weird (but simple enough to fit into a title) gimmick." Teasing Master Takagi-san, the reigning champion of this rom-com sub-genre, has the teasing and the competition. Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible has the protagonist with supernatural levels of anonymity. The Dangers in My Heart has the guy who is an edgy middle-schoolers early-2000s MySpace rants come to life. Here, our resident Boy-Kun, Kaede, has a crush on Ai, who is basically Velma from Scooby-Doo, when her glasses fall off (or, in this case, are repeatedly forgotten or broken in increasingly contrived circumstances).

Even when you try to consider this pair of would-be lovebirds as distinct entities from the nightmare world of insane compositing, preposterous lighting, and vomit-inducing cinematography that they've been imprisoned within, there's not a lot to work with here. The show turns Kaede's haplessness up to eleven, making him appear more annoying and pathetic than endearing. Ai, for her part, can't even begin to approach believability with the way that the story has decided to anchor its entire gimmick to having her be rendered utterly helpless and brainless most of the time. One funny joke that got me to almost smile in this episode: when the show punctuates Kaede and Ai's fretting over a dodgeball game with a pathetic one-shot from the opposing kid. That's maybe thirty to sixty frames of joy amid thousands of frames' worth of misery.

To be clear, though, the chief source of that misery comes from GoHands' stubborn commitment to destroying the very foundations of good taste and decent filmmaking with every single series they produce. I have been told that there are people out there who do not mind—or, if it can be believed, even like—the way that GoHands stages, renders, and animates its scenes. I am willing to accept that as a true fact. However, I will never understand it because at least two-thirds of this premiere constitutes some of the most garish, poorly framed, and obnoxiously short animation I've ever seen.

You know, the usual GoHands routine.

From the first shot of the episode, I could barely concentrate on what any of the characters were saying or doing because my brain refused to ignore all the different and incredible ways that The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses screw up even the most basic principles of visual storytelling.

Why, in the name of all that is good in this world, would anyone think that this distractingly flashy and kinetic style, not to mention the retina-searing clash of colors and crappy 3D backgrounds, would be a good fit for a freaking slice-of-life romance story? It beggars belief. It defies all logic. To paraphrase one Jesse Pinkman: "They can't keep getting away with this!"

Until I watched this episode, I didn't realize that it was possible to be both bored and motion sick simultaneously. Thanks, GoHands, for teaching me that very important lesson. Of course, not all of that is, strictly speaking, the adaptation's fault. My actual biggest issue with this is that the premise is so incredibly paper thin, and that fault lies squarely with the source manga. The idea that Mie has such miserable eyesight that she can't tell which shoes are her own or read her textbook unless she's a millimeter from the actual print and yet somehow managed to walk to school and make it to the classroom sans spectacles is crazier to me than anything in Undead Murder Farce. My point of reference? I have very poor vision without my glasses and believe me, I know very well when I don't have them on. It's frankly less believable than almost any other excuse cooked up by a rom-com in need of a reason for a hot girl to be interested in a bland guy I've encountered.

It also doesn't feel like nearly enough to get an entire series out of, especially since it was veering straight into Dullsville within half of this episode's runtime. There are really only so many things that Mie can blunder into blindly during the school day, and many of the more exciting ones – we know there are stairs in the school building and that Komura and Mie's classroom is up them – are left out. Instead, it's all about reading textbooks (but not the board) and finding her shoe locker, with bonus gym class for good measure. It's also credulity-straining in how these things are handled; why didn't Komura take Mie's bag and find her textbook for her, or use her book himself? I realize that the answer is "because then they wouldn't have gotten physically close," but still. If you don't give my brain enough to do during an episode, these are the kind of questions I start asking, and it does no one any favors.

When all of this nothing is combined with the artistic stylings of GoHands, the result is an unholy combination of stultifying and nausea-inducing. There are a few elements of the art and animation that I don't hate – Mie's lava lamp eyes are kind of pretty, and I like the way her hair moves – but these pale in comparison to the less good choices. Why is the camera so devotedly on the floor during walking scenes? It's not for fanservice, which would at least be a reason. How does Mie's hair expand to fill however much space there is around her? Why do we sometimes get random strands of it blowing across the screen at an angle that implies that it couldn't possibly be attached to her head? And for the love of mud, why must the camera swoop around every single corner in the episode?

Obviously, this doesn't work for me on any level. If you're fond enough of the source manga, it may work better for you, but I can't honestly say that I recommend this to anyone.

For years, Studio GoHands has had a well-earned reputation as the punching bag of the anime industry. There's, of course, the lingering plagiarism scandal that has kept their Tokyo Babylon anime reboot shelved for years; however, they're mostly known for making shows that look like reheated garbage in a very specific way. Most bad-looking TV anime looks unfinished, haphazardly thrown together, and bears the marks of a rushed production, like last year's Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer. Not so for GoHands, where they look this bad entirely through undying effort and determination, paired with horribly misguided creative decisions and a total inability to compose digital animation. They're awful to look at, will probably give you a headache, and by all appearances, they're precisely what the creative leads envisioned.

It's that combo of high effort and visible deficient results that makes GoHands productions a kind of trainwreck experience, and it's only heightened here as they adapt someone else's work without adjusting their style at all. These overly complex sequences still exist where the simulated camera swoops around the room and characters. At the same time, the hand-drawn assets try in vain to stay recognizable and move roughly at the same frame rate as the CG backgrounds. We still have sickly yellow and blue filters trying desperately to make the various digital effects look like they exist in the same universe. Every single metal surface reflects light like polished silver, even if there's no visible light source, and the CG halls and classrooms are suffocated with distracting dust motes for seemingly no reason. All of these were problems with the likes of Hand Shakers, but now they're especially disconcerting because this is absolutely not the kind of show that calls for any of this.

Put frankly, the original manga is a dirt simple rom-com with the premise right there in the title. Komura sits next to his near-sighted crush, Mie, and whenever she forgets her glasses, she gets right up in his business, and blushy-crush panic ensues. It's a straightforward bit of fluff made primarily for fans of sedate anime rom-com and not anyone else. While not a favorite of mine, a more competent (and conventional) adaptation with the right comedic timing could have probably landed this as a pleasant enough diversion, similar to Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible. Yet with this visual treatment – and the show's baffling editing – all that charm is sucked out of the characters, leaving a thin romance with no chemistry or character to speak of.

Komura doesn't feel like a nervous teenager but a weird, obsessive creep solely obsessed with Mie's appearance. Mie comes across like a giant, legally blind baby who can barely function even when she isn't seeing the world as a distorted blur. The conversations and skits they share are too slow-paced and disjointed, even when you're not distracted by the realistically shaded CG furniture around them or the simulated camera shake. It turns out that many high school comedies look conventional because the simple direction and bright colors go a long way in making these stories pleasant to experience, and that all goes away when you direct it like a fever dream.

More than anything that makes this premiere – and GoHands' involvement – such a bummer. These aren't just overly-ambitious creative decisions being applied with limited resources – they're actively damaging decisions that take another person's work and drain it of what made the original catch on with people in the first place. It's not just an ugly, unpleasant show to look at but a misguided and confusing bastardization of something the adaptive team was trusted with translating into motion. I can't speak for the original mangaka, but I don't imagine their fans will find anything worth following with this show.

I'm sure much will be said by my fellow reviewers here about this episode's dynamic camera movements, unconventional camera angles, and use of the animated equivalent of a fish-eye lens... but that won't stop me from talking about it too.

The mixture of 3D environments and 2D animation has come a long way in the past 10 years. On a technical level, having long, unbroken shots where the camera spins around the characters or zooms through the desks of a classroom in a way that a real camera physically could not is impressive. On top of that, being able to replicate various real-world lens effects, and break away from the directorial styles of the past that were more focused on the budget than creativity is likewise laudable.

However, when it comes to the camera work in this episode, I think Ian Malcolm, one of the twentieth century's foremost mathematicians, said it best: "[They] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." This isn't a demo reel that the studio has constructed to show potential clients what they can do—it's a light-hearted rom-com about a boy who has a crush on a girl who constantly forgets her glasses.

The directorial purpose of a show should always be to tell the story in the best way possible. What you show and how you show it dictate much of how the viewer feels. A Dutch camera angle shows unease—as if the whole world has been tilted to the side. A fish-eye lens shows a sense of warped reality—as if constants like size, shape, and perspective are no longer what they should be. Overusing these (and similar) techniques—especially when not used for their commonly associated purposes—is wildly distracting at best.

As you can likely guess from the fact that this article has only had a single sentence about what the actual show is about, this episode is a catastrophic failure on the directing front. The near-unceasing visual assault makes it hard to focus on or enjoy the story.

And honestly, as far as the story goes, it's probably fine. As someone who spent most of his life blind as a bat, there were things I could identify with (being without my glasses always put me to sleep, for one). And I thought it was a cute little twist that she has a memory problem rather than a vision problem (the idea of forgetting your glasses when your eyes are that bad is absurd.)

So, while the story might be decent, the fact of the matter is that this adaptation hardly does it justice. It's far too focused on showcasing all the crazy things that can be done with animation these days rather than supporting its story competently. If you're interested in this one at all, it's probably best to just read the manga instead.