It appears that Okazu Staff huddle together when they encounter a trashfire in media, so once again, we are here to debrief and detox.
Today we are gathered together to memorialize our sanity, lost via Momentary Lily, streaming on Crunchyroll.
Christian LeBlanc
My first impression of the new
GoHands joint was that it felt like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken violently by someone vomiting glitter everywhere. And this is coming from someone who generally enjoys GoHands’ output, in defiance of people who point out the flaws in their animation.
Admittedly, I’m not particularly literate in cinema, and so online discussions will often illustrate to me why a scene in a movie works as well as it does. Likewise, people online can point out how GoHands is using an ambitious camera angle or perspective in the wrong place, but I may not always notice something’s off, and simply enjoy seeing the camerawork go absolutely ham for someone walking up a flight of stairs. And why not? Anime is generally exaggerated anyway, right?
Well, let me explain in terms of music. Momentary Lily is like a slow ballad where someone starts shredding on their axe like crazy halfway through the first verse. Yes, it’s an impressively face-melting, blisteringly-fast guitar solo, but what is it doing after a line and a half of lyrics? Some people will be open-minded enough to simply enjoy the guitar solo, and won’t be bothered by how out of place it is. Conversely, some listeners won’t understand why the gentle singing was interrupted by a piece of music from a seemingly different tune, and will be taken out of the song because it’s so jarring and distracting.
My colleagues will expand on how all the different elements of this show make it less than the sum of its parts, but let me pass the baton with this: one character’s death lacks gravitas because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough over two episodes, while another girl’s breasts defy gravitas even as she’s sobbing over her impending doom. Please learn to read the room, Erika Koudaji’s breasts.
Eleanor Walker
I watched this while nursing a tremendous hangover and I’m genuinely not sure if it improved the experience or not. The main thing going through my mind was “she breasted boobily” every time a certain character was on the screen. I still don’t know why these collection of walking stereotypes, sorry, characters are doing what they’re doing, what the “Wild Hunt” is and where they’re getting the ingredients for the random cooking segments. It’s like one staffer wanted to make a cute girls doing cute things cooking show and another wanted to make a monster fighting explosion show and the studio just shrugged and said “eh, whatever, we can only afford to animate one pair of breasts so work together”. The voices are particularly grating, I’m not generally one who notices particularly bad voice acting, especially in Japanese (I didn’t notice Hideaki Anno in The Wind Rises, for example, which was widely complained about online) but dearie me the voices in this one make me want to gouge my eardrums out with a melon baller.
Erica Friedman
This project is infamously animated by GoHands, a group that takes their work as animators VERY seriously, as everything in this anime moves, constantly. Even things that do not actually ever move.
In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been hunted by “The Wild Hunt” – over-animated kaijuu – a girl with a mysterious ability to call up a magical, science fiction-y, mega weapon finds a small group of other teenage girls with similar abilities. Whether you consider these girls to be special forces, or refugees or just plain child soldiers, don’t worry about the details…their misery and trauma will be mined for laughs and pathos and boob jiggles. And cooking lessons, so even at the end of the world, we can make a nice meal of rice and canned mackerel. We got to get our priorities straight.
As for the service – to quote the great Pamela Poovey, “Inappropes.”
Grab a Dramamine and watch Momentary Lily, with a cast of girls with verbal tics that stand in for a personality.
Frank Hecker
Fans of the anime Shirobako may recall a scene in which two animators are discussing a new technique for making reflections off eyeglasses look more realistic, followed by a shot of one person’s glasses illustrating that very technique. Watching Momentary Lily is like watching that scene on infinite repeat, but without the self-reflexive humor. After viewing the first couple of minutes of episode 1 in the conventional way, I turned the sound and subtitles off so I could appreciate Momentary Lily for what it really is, a SIGGRAPH demo with fighting girls. (I originally wrote “magical girls,” but they don’t have transformation sequences—more’s the pity.)
Watching the show this way helps make sense of some of the shot and plot choices. Why does one of the girls show off her moisturizing regimen in the first scene? So that we can see how well GoHands can model shiny skin (presumably using Phong shading or some more recent technique). Why do the girls take a break from fighting monsters to have a meal? So that the animators can take a break from animating kaijū and relax themselves, modeling various foods, plastic packages, tin cans, utensils, and so on. (They even show a cousin of the famous Utah teapot.) And most notably: why does the girls’ hair fly around so much? It’s simultaneously a plea to the production committee and a boast to the viewer: “If we had a bigger budget, we could animate every hair.”
I guess there’s a story here somewhere and presumably some attempts at characterization, but really the girls are to GoHands what the Madonna and child and other Biblical scenes were to Renaissance painters, a conventional set of stock images used to demonstrate mastery of their craft. (My using the word “craft” and not “art” is deliberate; there is little art here.) Watching Momentary Lily like I did highlights those demonstrations: the omnipresent lens flare that shifts position depending on which way the light is coming from, the focus pulling and bokeh, the way the clouds constantly moving across the sky are reflected in the windows of the buildings in the background. For me, the emotional climax of episode 2 was not the foreground scene of a girl in extremis, but rather the background shot of a tree with all its leaves rippling in the wind.
I especially loved the shots of buildings shown in dramatic perspective, whether during the day or at night, viewed clearly or enshrouded in fog. Which brings me to my recommendation to GoHands: forget plot, character, and dialogue. Ditch the monsters, include more scenes with buildings and benches, erase the girls from every shot, and create what the world has been waiting for: a true masterpiece of “yuri of absence.”
Luce
Well that sure was an eye workout. Ow.
Setting aside the camera for now, this is distinctly mediocre. Sci-fi and post-apocalypse isn’t my thing, but this wouldn’t sell me. The five characters we see initially are unmemorable, apart from ‘onee-chan’ with the big bouncing boobs that are totally unnecessary and look like they’re about to float her off to space. (One character says ‘too much jiggle’. Don’t call it out and flaunt it at the same time.) Renge, the ‘main’ character, is screechy, then apologising for the weirdest things, like ‘imposing’ on the group with a awkwardly cut cooking ‘segment’, as they refer to it. Wow, she’s amnesiac, has a cool weapon and can one shot the big robots. Great, sure sounds like a plot thread right there. Too bad I’m not interested.
Sadly, even if I was interested, watching this feels like an attack on the optic nerve. Aside from over-animated hair and one set of boobs, the animation is middling, but not awful. But it’s like someone heard ‘dynamic camera angles’ and decided this meant ‘camera must move every two seconds’. It’s at odd angles, or moving, but in really jarring ways that almost follow characters but not quite. There’s more lens flares than Star Trek. And what is with the split screens?!
If you have a tendency to migraines, or any visually triggered illnesses, avoid this. I promise it’s not worth it. I’m off to have a lie down.
Matt Marcus
When my friend and cohost Sibyl sent me the trailer for Momentary Lily, my first thought was “someone must really like RWBY.” As the announcement began circulating in my online spaces, I had only seen dismissive, but not illuminating, comments about the studio that made it. It wasn’t on my radar, but between my friend’s excitement and the reactions from the folks in the Discord after episode 1 dropped, I figured I would give it a shot.
Y’all, I was not prepared.
I could go on about the visually chaotic and cacophonous opening, but that’s just where it begins. From opening to ending, watching Momentary Lily is like reading one of those giant posts of text with three emojis after every sentence, but also the font is Wingdings.
The script feels like it was written by ChatGPT trained using the dialogue of every lady-led shonen show, but dumber. There’s the gamer girl who chugs energy drinks and calls them her “buffs” in every sentence she speaks. There’s the chipper leader with a verbal tic. There’s the serious dark-haired girl with glasses with a verbal tic. There’s the “big sister” archetype with absurd breast physics. There’s the gyaru girl. And, of course, we have the overpowered amnesiac lead who is so obscenely shy that half her dialogue is in pantomime. The characterization is so thin I’m surprised that their models are not literally transparent.
But we’re not here for deep ruminations on the human soul, are we? No, we’re here to see some overly-stylized teenagers do some high-flying ass-kicking! So that part must be good right? I got bad news for you: the action is messy, hard to follow, and extremely headache inducing. The characters don’t match the garish, hyper-saturated 3D backgrounds in both visual style and, worse, in framerate. Even in shots where the background isn’t moving as if the camera is being controlled by a drunk crane operator, the point of view zooms in and out and bounces around like a nap-skipping toddler on caffeine. It’s as if GoHands was afraid that if they didn’t jangle every key in front of our face for the entire scene, we’d lose interest mid-sword swing.
But beyond all that, the biggest sin is the pacing. Characters only have space to do schtick between the barest of exposition. Tone shifts rapidly from “badass” action to cutesy cooking segments where Amnesia Girl shows her new pals how to make otaku struggle meals. (Each episode is named for the dish said girl makes, so I guess this was The Thing GoHands decided the show should be About.) Scenes are smashed together with no sense of time passing. A character is killed in episode 2, and the previews of the next episode suggest that the show is going to tell us why we should’ve cared about this girl in the first place. It’s jarring and exhausting and boring at the same time.
And don’t get me started on the worldbuilding. Almost every human on earth has been vaporized yet social media still functions! Can’t wait for the plot to hinge on the crew posting their 7-Eleven survivalist stews on the ‘Gram. GOD this sucks.
The thing that strikes me the most about the show is that there is clearly effort and skill on display, and yet it is applied in the most artless way I have ever seen. It’s fascinating in that way: a show ostensibly about cooking that lacks taste. For all the “flavor” tossed in, this is very thin gruel.
Ratings:
Story – eh
Characters – verbal tics and trauma
Animation – LOL
Service – too much jiggle
Yuri – no thank you
Overall – canned fish
Are we tired of Isekai stories yet? Well, yes, and no. ^_^ The basic zero-reincarnates-as-a-hero premise was always pretty sad and got tired quickly,but that had more to do with the nature of their sad little power fantasies. We’ve seen many stories, which still have room room for creativity. Even aside from a blockbuster like I’m In Love With The Villainess, there are number of isekai and reverse isekai stories we’re reading now that have some cleverness or kindness or both. And, when a story both leans into its premise with gusto and has fun doing it, we’ll definitely make time for it.
