In 2014, Studio P.A. Works made Glasslip, a story about a group of friends in a world that’s at least somewhat mystical despite otherwise seeming like it belongs to the familiar, whose lives and dynamics are disrupted – possibly for the better – by the arrival of a stranger to their clique, with a heavy focus on the romances within the group. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you could bump the year up by four and change the name to Iroduku and give the same introduction.
In a sense, it’s clear when looking at both of them that they’re creatively related works, with either Glasslip being the prototype for Iroduku or Iroduku the rehash of Glasslip, depending on how you want to look at it and the four years between their releases.
But, I’ve seen that relationship before, and it surprisingly says very little about the relative quality. There’s a temptation to credit the older entry as having done it first, but first isn’t always best; rather, some ideas need a second take to actually come out well. 2010’s Star Driver would basically experience the same thing: four years later in 2014, its core ideas, themes, and basic skeleton were reworked into Captain Earth. And anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows that I usually have nothing good to say when I pull up Star Driver. Captain Earth I reference less, because you know what? Captain Earth was alright.
Iroduku was already pretty good, but let’s find out if it was the knock-off or the upgrade.
Glasslip begins with a largely uneventful trip by a group of friends to the summer festival. It’s mostly montage with a vague hint of… something.
After that, one of the girls – aspiring glass artisan and main character Touko Fukami – is approached by the mysterious transfer student (who she nicknames “David”, after the Michelangelo sculpture) and they have this bizarre battle of ethics over the school chickens with their bizarre names. Because “Crazy Chicken Girl” is evidently a romantic archetype. Later, after she and her friends all take the chickens home to make sure they stay safe, the guy appears at their hangout, says he “Saw what she saw” and invites her to meet at an arbitrary location. During this encounter, the rest of the friends are extremely hostile to this strange interloper. To be fair, he did just drop in out of nowhere while they were chatting.
These interchanges highlight one issue with Glasslip, and that’s the characters. Specifically, the first thing you’ll likely notice is how the characters talk. In Glasslip, there are three ways characters will talk, and it’s fairly emblematic of the ways you can have fictional characters in general talk.
In some cases, like while they’re all at the summer festival, they’ll talk like ordinary human beings. This isn’t actually great. Dialogue and conversation are different things, and while there is some impetus to have dialogue sound natural, like it could come out of a real person talking, it usually isn’t that way under the hood. Dialogue needs to pace itself to the viewer’s understanding rather than the character’s speed of thought, and more than that dialogue has purpose. Dialogue expresses something, and conveys information in a way that benefits the third party on the other side of the fourth wall. You can (and in fact, need to) have some of that information be the voice of the character, but the goal is to have verisimilitude (for the uninitiated, the appearance or feeling of being real), not genuine realism.
Realistic conversation is meandering, obtuse, and full of holes compared to well-written dialogue. In fiction, it becomes noise very easily. It’s fine to have some of that as a stylistic choice, especially if what’s being said isn’t very important and could be kind of reduced to white noise. Which, to its credit, fits the festival scene in Glasslip, but I want this on the record because Glasslip uses it all over, especially when the group is together as a group rather than broken into pairs.
As you might have guessed, the second mode is Dialogue, but it’s frankly underutilized. There’s a fuzzy line between the two, though, which gets us a lot of conversations that while meandering and soporific I can at least credit as being well formed. And while it may sound like I’m being hard on the show right out of the gate, meandering and soporific is actually fine if what you want to evoke is a sense of peace and pleasantness. I could have leveled the same words at Flying Witch and it was just fine.
The third mode is, instead of like a real person or like a well-constructed character… like a complete space alien. The first time this happens in Glasslip is in the chicken conversation, which launches into this charged, vehement, yet arbitrary and difficult to follow argument. Both characters become powerfully invested in their moon logic, confront each other over something about chickens and wild animals, and then it just ends.
Like realism in conversation, this is a tool that good writers could use. Typically, it would be to establish that a character is weird. Noe and Meiya have some conversations where they’re clearly not on the same plane as anybody else… but that’s supposed to be true in-character. They’re weird people who see things in a weird way. Here? The show just launches into a bit that I’m pretty sure one of the writers thought was cool without much concern for what comes first, or what comes after.
Back to the plot, Touko goes to the meeting with David – properly introduced as Kakeru Okikura – and after dismissing her excessively hostile escort friend, actually hears him out. He says more or less that they share the ability to witness fragments of the future, seeing brief visions and even hearing voices from outside time. A quick grilling of Touko reveals that her visions in particular are acquired through sparkly objects, particularly glass. Fascinating. So what do they do with it?
At first, pretty much nothing. The talk we get at the start is quite vague in all the early conversations between Touko and Kakeru. Touko then goes back to her friend group for their romantic subplot: she learns that one friend, Yanagi Takayama wants to confess to her crush from the friend group, Yukinari Imi. Touko tries to set this up (totally normally, not with future sight or anything or she might have known what was going to happen) and ends up needling Yuki into confessing to his crush… her. Apparently, Touko was the only one who couldn’t see this coming.
Touko doesn’t take it well. She asks Kakeru for more details on seeing the future, but gets more vague space alien talk in return. The gang – Touko, Yanagi, Yuki, Hiro Shirosaki, and Sachi Nagamiya – go camping where Touko talks things out with Yanagi and gives Yuki a firm “no”. On the B line, Hiro has a crush on Sachi that he’s too timid to really break to her. Sachi, however, might be in medical trouble, as Touko glimpses her in a hospital gown, looking down, through her spontaneous future visions.
This is the show, people. Back when I reviewed Iroduku, I went in very broad strokes for the exact reason that we’re seeing here: there are a lot of plot threads, and most of them just sort of… hang out existing most of the time, with a special focus on romantic entanglements, misunderstandings, and confessions
We eventually do work out rough pictures of the characters. Touko is mild and easily flustered. Yanagi is serious. Yuki is a kind of brooding jerk. Hiro is avid and timid. Sachi is quiet. And Kakeru? Maybe “space alien” is the right pick for Kakeru.
The show does its best avoiding the easy spare-paring: Yuki resists a confession from Yanagi (which she kind of knew wasn’t going to work) and gets in the rival business with Kakeru, who heats things up with Touko only extremely slowly… possibly to do with having some kind of multiple personality deal going on. And since Sachi and Hiro was going too well (if in a more “grade school” way than the fact these are supposed to be high school seniors), to the point where they’re “official”, it turns out she’s kind of got a dark side where she schemes up bullying of Kakeru because she doesn’t think he’s good for Touko. In fact, she may just be using Hiro while wanting Touko herself, there’s a lot left to implication on that score for a bit.
Eventually things start to round the corner. Sachi confesses to Touko, but also kind of to Hiro. Touko doesn’t seem to get it. Yuki starts to come around regarding Yanagi. Touko and Kakeru have a rough time due to Touko seeing a few “scary” visions while around him – one where birds fly at her and one where it’s snowing and she and Kakeru kiss that has a different texture than previous visions. As easily as this pushes the two apart, a couple episodes later it pushes them together and they kiss for real. Still without having used future sight to actually do anything.
So, by one thing or another, the obvious three couples become the obvious three couples, with the only lingering rub seeming to be that David might go with his mother on her globe-trotting piano tour. But he likes Touko and wants to stop being lonely, so there’s also a chance he’ll decline.
We then get, in a bizarre turn, an episode that just shows us a different slice of life. Same town, same kids, different time (starting in winter, when Touko was seeing mysterious snow in the main timeline) and the couples form. The main difference seems to be that in this world, Touko is the transfer student and Kakeru the native.
This turns out to be one big vision, confirming for Touko, who is experiencing it, that her “fragments” aren’t the future at all, but rather glimpses of a parallel world.
There is still no point to them. Actually, I would argue that there’s even less point than there was before. Not only are they not useful for prediction, not only is nothing really done with them, but their one purpose – an arbitrary hook to draw Kakeru and Touko together – is shown via their history in the parallel to be unnecessary for them to bond.
After this revelation, it’s time for the grand finale, in which… pretty much nothing happens. Touko and Kakeru talk out their last issues, overcoming one final misunderstanding where Touko wants what they have while Kakeru fears he’s hurt her, and the show plays us out with some arbitrary scenes that seem to imply that all is to be well with three couples together and Kakeru being less weird, like no longer living in a tent in the yard of his family’s perfectly good house.
The fragments? As addressed as they’re going to be. Yuki and Yanagi? I mean, I’ve been calling them one of the couples and they sort of seem like an item, but it’s not as though we get a kiss or re-confession out of them. Sachi and Hiro seem to be doing alright, at least. Kakeru isn’t really seen in the final montage, just implied, so maybe something happened with him? At the very least the bizarre plot device where he talks to imaginary other selves is never addressed, resolved, or explained. The show just says, “Yup, romance is on track, my work here is done.”
“But,” I protest, “You didn’t do anything!”
And that is Glasslip’s biggest problem, even more than the issue with the character writing: It doesn’t have any content worth watching. It puffs itself as though it’s not just slice of life with the Fragments and the seeming friction within the group, but the friction is dispensed by the halfway point and the show just sort of stumbles forward as Slice of Nothing. Boring Slice of Nothing at that.
Glasslip lasts thirteen episodes, but it doesn’t have the content for it. The show is bloated on the macro level, with pretty much the whole second half just being a long tail to address non-existent issues, and individual episodes are bloated with tons of waste, scene by scene.
I like it when shows take their time and control their pace, but Glasslip goes too far. It relies, almost constantly, on long establishing shots or sequences of establishing shots that, rather than accentuating the scenes that they establish, end up feeling like they’re replacements for actual scenes with how much running time they eat up.
Contrast this with Iroduku, or the Makoto Shinkai film Your Name (which features a main couple drawn together by a supernatural phenomenon, but then does everything right with that). You can have a clean, steady romance still be interesting. Glasslip isn’t it.
On the positive side, if you want to see realism, I think Glasslip kind of gives it to you. It avoids melodrama (even though that can also be realistic) without going full-on fairy tale. It has a supernatural element, but the degree to which that element matters is “not at all” for two of the three couples and basically nil for the third, despite it technically being an establishing element. But what that leaves isn’t that interesting, at least not for the whole running time.
The art is, honestly, gorgeous. But I specify the art rather than the animation. The animation has its moments but we also spend a lot of time panning across or cutting between stills or barely-moving images with long-shots of the town, building exteriors, pretty skies, and so on. It also has an effect, which I think it started leaning on when a budget crunch was felt, where a frame will randomly freeze like a snapshot and have a photoshop blur filter applied.
You see this kind of thing all the time in shows for advertisement bumpers or episode ends, but here they just kind of throw it in at random. There are even times when a conversation or even scene just keeps going. Combine this with awkward, purposeless sequences and it’s sometimes hard to know what to make of what the creators are doing.
Take this for example: there’s a scene in the second half where we follow Yanagi home alone while Yuki is at a training camp for his Track and Field team. In a normal show, you’d probably show a couple of seconds of her to create an emotional impression and then move on with something with a little more meat to it.
Instead, we show Yanagi changing clothes (or rather, disrobing) and walking around the house naked for an uncomfortable amount of time. So, okay, fanservice right? Well, the camera work disagrees. There is no prurient fanservice anywhere else in Glasslip and I don’t think that was the intention here. When the show is too squeaky clean to give us swimsuits in summer in a seaside town, I doubt it was meaning to use nudity this deep in the show to trigger something in viewers’ pants. Further, throughout the whole process, we get several of these grainy-filter freeze frames and cuts. Like, while she’s changing, it just freezes on the back of her bra strap and puts the filter on for a couple of seconds like this is something really important. And then it just cuts to her continuing to change. I think there were three freeze frames during the changing alone.
The entire sequence is awkward, uncomfortable, comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and expresses nothing. You could cut the entire scene, and all its freeze frames with it, and lose absolutely nothing because what we need about Yanagi around then we get in other scenes: how she’s taking up Yuki’s running route while he’s out of town. Even that is something that seems pretty arbitrary and has a huge running time dedicated to it across multiple episodes for a tiny, low-key payoff when Yuki discovers this on his return. I guess by the end of the show they’re running together, so couple thing?
This might be the best combined example of the micro and macro waste (the naked scene is micro waste, the “she runs his exact schedule now for no discussed reason” arc is macro), but there are others all over Glasslip.
It’s clear that Iroduku is the better product. Iroduku had stronger characters, a better scenario, more visual wonder, and an interesting sequence of events. It was a good show knowing nothing about Glasslip, and Glasslip is going to do absolutely nothing to even shake it on its pedestal. But how does Glasslip fare on its own?
It’s bad… really bad. I ended up looking deep inside myself in order to decide if I was going to give Glasslip an outright Fail. It is, when you get down to it, unlikely to really make anybody cringe in pain. Glasslip isn’t going to hurt you. It’s just going to put you to sleep.
But… it’s going to put you to sleep. What little there is here that you could get invested in ends up being diluted in the long montages and ultimate pointlessness to the point where its presence is downright homeopathic. It’s a pretty show to look at, I can’t and won’t try to take that away from Glasslip. I’d say you could mute it and enjoy, but the problem is that’s almost what the show does with all the time-filling silent shots. It’s all too often less a show and more some pretty background images for a piano recital.
From that, Glasslip may be a more “watchable” Fail than most of the shows I’ve sunk to the bottom rank. But when it largely doesn’t function as a show, I can’t give it any other grade. At least it’s easy to know what to watch instead.