Review for Glasslip - Complete Collection

Introduction

This is an odd one. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you’ll know of my appreciation of the work of Studio P.A. Works, and a triumvirate of slice-of-life shows from them, Hanasaku Iroha, A Lull in the Sea, and The Eccentric Family always hover around my top ten anime list. They don’t just do slice of life, and like them or not, there’s always an extra level of quality with shows like Another, Angel Beats, Canaan, and Shirobako. A studio P.A. Works production will automatically go onto my Crunchyroll queue, and will most likely end up in my collection as well. Which makes Glasslip such a head-scratcher. It’s a P.A. Works slice-of-life show, it looks painfully pretty, and it’s got the obligatory nano.RIPE end theme. It should be manna from heaven. But when I watched it streamed on Crunchyroll, I had no reaction to it at all, in either direction. One convenient sale later, I’m ready to give it another try, this time at a more even pace, at home, on DVD. Let’s see if Glasslip registers the second time around...


For five friends in a quiet seaside town, it’s their last chance to spend summer together, as the prospect of graduation means that this time next year, they may be in very different places, doing different things. But for Touko, Sachi, Yana, Hiro and Yuki, it’s going to get typically more complicated, as adolescence takes its toll, and friendships are liable to be supplanted by relationships. And even before feelings, simple mathematics means that someone’s going to get hurt. Touko would much rather keep things painless for the friends, so it’s useful that she can see into the future. Just glimpses really, moments of revelation triggered by sparkly objects, much like the glass baubles she creates in her father’s glassworks studio. But then there’s a new arrival in town, a transfer student named Kakeru, and he can hear the future, and it turns out that for Touko and Kakeru together, the future is revealed in far greater clarity. It’s going to be an interesting summer...


13 episodes of Glasslip are presented across 3 DVDs from Sentai Filmworks.

Disc 1
1. Fireworks
2. The Bench
3. The Water Can
4. The Slope

Disc 2
5. Hinode Bridge
6. The Punch
7. The Bicycle
8. Snow

Disc 3
9. The Moon
10. Jonathan
11. The Piano
12. Fireworks (Again)
13. Shooting Stars

Picture

Glasslip gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic NTSC transfer on these discs, progressively encoded for compatible equipment. The image is clear and sharp throughout, with consistent colours, no visible compression artefacts, and a minimum of banding. It’s a solid DVD transfer that scales up competently, although Blu-ray will be preferable. Studio P.A. Works do it again, delivering a show that is so beautiful that it hurts the eyes. The character designs are generic anime style, but animated with a strong attention to detail and realistic motion. But it’s in the world design that the show excels, really bringing the quiet seaside town to life with almost a photo-real recreation. However all isn’t perfect in the world of Glasslip, as the prevalence of harmonies attests to. Harmonies are those freeze frame moments in anime that are rendered in artistic style to capture a mood, an emotion, emphasise a moment of drama. They happen so often in Glasslip, and are so oddly placed in some cases, that while watching the streams, I was half convinced that the animators ran out of budget, went for a shortcut, and would complete the animation for home video release. But no, this is actually how the show’s meant to be. The harmonies do begin to grate after a while.

Sound

The sole audio option here is DD 2.0 Japanese with optional English subtitles. The audio is fine, the actors suited well to the characters, the mellow ambience of the show coming through well with the stereo format, and the light orchestral music really working the strings, the piano, the woodwind, almost giving the show a classical air. It saves the poppiness for the opening and closing themes, the latter of which features P.A. Works stalwarts, nano.RIPE. The subtitles are timed accurately and are free of typos, although I do get the feeling that they’ve been transferred from the Crunchyroll scripts without proofreading. Certainly the eye-opening “Taniguchi did the 10,000 metre dash in 39 seconds” has come through uncorrected. I’d certainly be doing a few doping tests on any athlete that could run at three-quarters the speed of sound! Also the subtitles write the name as ‘Toko’ even though the spelling in the credits is ‘Touko’.

Extras

The discs present their content with static menus, jacket pictures, and each episode is followed by a translated English credit reel.

Disc 1 holds the extra features, which you’ll get to after it autoplays a trailer for Beyond the Boundary.

On the disc, you’ll find the textless credits, and further trailers for nas-imasaS[at]ianarabnaG, Sabagebu! Survival Game Club!, The World is Still Beautiful, and Beyond the Boundary again.

Conclusion

That was even more disappointing the second time around. At least coming to it fresh, I had no idea what to expect, could go into it hoping to be entertained, and taking it at face value until the inevitable deflation occurred. This time with the DVD, I knew full well what was coming, and just as with the dreaded injections in the doctor’s surgery, the anticipation offered just as much pain as the actual inoculation, if not more. Glasslip is a show with excellent production values, complex and layered characters, some pretty good writing, and a couple of good ideas, but it’s let down wholly in the execution, saddled with a paranormal maguffin that goes nowhere and means nothing. It can be summed up in the two words that I wrote at the end of my notes about the show, “Pretentious Twaddle!”


It’s a coming of age comedy drama, following a group of friends over their summer holidays. Touko’s father owns a glass studio, and she helps him at his work, as well as creating some art of her own. Yuki is an athlete, while Yana is learning to dance. Their parents recently remarried, and they’ve become step-siblings. Sachi is a bookish girl of frail constitution who is in and out of hospital, while Hiro’s grandfather runs the cafe where the friends usually wind up meeting and hanging out. They’ve all grown up together, although they’re at an age where their friendships are starting to evolve and change. The catalyst for that change comes in the form of Kakeru who’s moving to the town. He quickly makes a connection with Touko, but as he’s always been on the move with his itinerant pianist mother, he’s never had the chance to settle down and make friends. He’s light on social skills, and the others, particularly Yuki, take an instant dislike to him.


With young people at that age, it’s all about romance and relationships, and with childhood friendships liable to become something deeper, there are a whole lot of frayed tempers and hurt feelings possible, especially when it seems that Touko’s made a connection with the ‘outsider’. Of course Yuki’s sweet on Touko, while Yana has old feelings for her new step-brother. Hiro’s sweet on Sachi, but it looks like Sachi doesn’t want to know. It could get soap opera bad, but in Glasslip the relationship angst is uncovered with gentle, slice-of-life triviality. Hurt feelings do occur, but they are easily healed, and relationships redefined. Glasslip could have been a reasonable teenage drama, children at the start of a summer holiday having grown up emotionally by the end of their school vacation.


But there is that paranormal maguffin that buries all this light drama in a meaningless supernatural mystery. When Touko looks at something sparkly, she sees glimpses of the future. Kakeru can hear snippets of the future, but when they are together, they get a bigger, clearer picture. It’s this shared ability that initially draws them together, and their relationship is based on their shared exploration of this ability, trying to understand it, to figure out what it means. All through the show, it gets this big sell, as Touko’s trying to see where her friends’ futures lie, and she tries to nudge them onto better paths. Every once in a while, Glasslip will throw in another ethereal oddity. Halfway through the show, Kakeru’s suddenly talking to two imaginary versions of himself. The penultimate episode is set in another reality altogether, where Kakeru’s the long term resident of the town with his friends, and Touko the new arrival. And no-one ever explains why Kakeru lives in a tent in his father’s back yard. But ultimately it all goes nowhere and means absolutely nothing. It’s a load of tosh that has distracted you from the actual character drama and growth that is the interesting aspect of Glasslip.


Glasslip is not a show to be enjoyed taken as a whole series. The episodes themselves aren’t too satisfying, but if you watch it in the moment, live in what the characters are doing and experiencing on screen at that time, then it’s an enjoyable experience. Once the cast broadens out, and you get to meet Touko’s family there are laughs to be had. Hina’s an interesting younger sister, and their parents have an odd romantic byplay going on (father tries to be romantic and nostalgic, mother shoots him down). Then again Hiro’s sister is a bubbly character who is also a terrifying driver. Glasslip can entertain... in the moment. I really do wish this show had an English dub, as it’s just the kind of television that you have on in the background while you do something else. It’s ambient noise. It’s beautifully animated ambient noise with great production values, trademark gorgeous to look at, but it’s noise nevertheless. Thankfully P.A. Works really picked themselves up with Shirobako.