Girls' Last Tour
I went into this show with the expectations of gentle post-apocalyptic slice of life, maybe with a little bit of military equipment fetishism on the side. I did not expect it to get so mono no aware on me.
I notice that as of today I've been posting on AUKN for ten years, on and off. I don't think I'll ever really leave, because I'll always love the medium of animation. But sometimes, mainly during the couple of long absences I've had from AUKN, I question whether anything new is being produced that's really for me. I usually like some of the new stuff that I'm watching, but I so rarely love it like I do some of the shows I first watched around the mid '00s. I often find myself wondering where are the new shows in the vein of Haibane Renmei or Kino's Journey? The shows that made me think and feel, that encourage quiet contemplation?
Well Girls' Last Tour reminded me quite a bit of that kind of show, but by the end it reminded me very much of something else - Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, my very favourite manga and possibly my favourite piece of media in any genre. When you look at the art styles and you look at the settings, they couldn't appear more different on the surface. Both are post-apocalyptic slice of life, but one is set in a grimy, militarised, claustrophobic and entirely man made urban environment, the other has a sleepy rural setting in which everything humanity has created is being slowly reclaimed by nature. But in terms of themes and atmosphere evoked they are in fact very similar, as are their wistful but generally positive takes on the last days of humanity.
The society and landscape of the future will be unrecognisable to us. Everyone and everything, eventually, is going to die and be forgotten. New people and things and ways of living will replace them. One day, with or without humanity's influence, even the planet itself is going to die. And actually, all of that is okay. The experience of loss, loss of anything - Material items, history, loved ones, is universal and natural and remembrance is something that brings both joy and sadness. But living and experiencing all of this is what it means to be human.
Like YKK, Girls' Last Tour is not a mournful cautionary tale of how humanity destroyed itself or ruined the planet. It's a celebration of the parts of the human experience that transcend the impermanence of that material world. It's affecting, sometimes beautiful and it's very Japanese, or at least very Oriental. I cannot imagine any Western country ever producing media that treats the end of civilisation and humanity in such a thoughtful and non-judgemental way. I think it's fair to say it's restored some of my faith in modern anime a bit. Did I enjoy Made in Abyss and Devilman Crybaby? Yeah, a lot. But neither of them made me sit in silence with slightly wet eyes and a smile on my face afterwards.
Now, I've been the subject of a little light ribbing in the past about my use of perhaps unnecessarily precise nought-point-something scores. But the way I try to look at scoring these days is a percentage out of 100% total running time that I enjoy watching, weighted against the percentage of time I'm not enjoying watching and am either actively annoyed, bored or would generally rather be doing something else. And on that front, this time I don't need a decimal point because Girls' Last Tour gets a rare perfect 10. There is not a minute I didn't enjoy and there is nothing that I would change about it at all.
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