HighWire: [Anime Review] Glasslip

"One sees clearly only with the heart.

Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. . . .

It’s the time that you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important. . . .

You become responsible for what you’ve tamed.

You’re responsible for your rose. . . .”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Melodrama is a term that I feel is thrown around in this medium a lot without much thought or care, but since it's pretty much going to be the driving topic of this review, it's probably a good idea if we define it right here and now. The confusion is probably due to how nebulous the concept has become in the situations it is applied, so forgive me if my definition doesn't quite match up with your own, but we need a solid definition so we can move forward with this review.
For me, when I say melodrama on this blog and in these reviews, I typically refer to "drama instigated by the narrative instead of the characters". Good drama is most efficiently communicated when actions, both rash and seemingly inevitable, are instigated by the characters, while melodrama appears when the narrative has seemingly run out of things to do, and needs some unconsequential actions to shake the status quo before instantly restoring it. That seems to be a practice, that the topic of today's review: Glasslip, has somewhat mastered.
Hello people of "The Wired", my name is Quan, I hope you're having a pleasant day, and welcome, one and all, to a new anime review... finally. It's time to beat on this dead and brutalized horse, so join me in picking out which bats to use. Let's get started.

Glasslip was animated by the wonderful P.A Works, who have made ripples before in the industry with such titles as Angel Beats!, Nagi no Asukara, and Shirobako. The director was Junji Nishimura, the guy behind True Tears and this season's Bakuon!!, with some rather mediocre stuff in between. Credit for script goes to Tatsuhiko Urahata, and that surprises me frankly, since Urahata has shown adept skill in multiple genres including slice-of-life and romance. Some of his notable scrips have been for anime like Nana, Rokka no Yuusha, Aria and Hanasaku Iroha, though to be fair, there's been some duds in the bunch, like Strike Witches, Haganai, and Escha & Logy no Atelier: Tasogare no Sora no Renkinjutsushi. Glasslip aired 13 episodes in the summer season of 2014, stretching from July 2nd to September 24th. With all the technical stuff out of the way, let's get this review started.

Story

Summer has arrived for Touko Fukami and her group of friends, which include the comic-relief Hiro, asshole-McEmo(or Yuki), glasses-endowed/resident lesbian Sachi, and spurned women Yanagi. The group of friends mostly live a peaceful life, as they struggle to figure out their feelings for one another, since trust me, the relationship dynamics in this show require a spreadsheet to understand, and decide what to do about their futures as the new year of school comes closer and closer. However, two events are about to shake the foundation of their friendships to the core.
The first thing that happens is the arrival of Kakeru Okikura(or David as he goes by), a brash and somewhat enigmatic new arrival in the town who seems to stir up trouble wherever he goes. While the group of friends seem to unanimously decide to hate him, Touko finds herself inexplicably drawn to David, not only because he is sort of hot as all hell, but because of the choice words he whispered to her on the night of a fireworks festival a few nights ago: "I saw the same thing." Which brings us the second disruption. Touko has been living her normal life without much drama thus far as she works towards an admirable goal of becoming a glass artisan and perhaps one day inheriting her family's studio, but on the night of the fireworks festival, a strange vision came to her as light reflected off of the thimble she held, showing Touka and her friends in places and situations she didn't recognize. Upon talking to David about it, it appears that he saw the same vision, and they mutually begin to understand that they both have the same strange power: to be able to see "shards" of the future reflected in anything shiny or bright.
Armed with fragmented knowledge of the future gained from these "shards", Touka attempts to both try to understand her power and the feelings she has begun to have for David, a situation made more complicated by the fact that both Yuki and Sachi already have a thing for Touka, while Hiro has a thing for Sachi, at the same time as Yanagi has a thing for Yuki(her step-brother, by the way), made even more ambiguous by the fact that David may or may have a thing for Touko as well. Got all of that? Good, because there's a quiz later.

Our main heroine Touko.

That's right, it's another big dumb "everyone is in love with everyone" scenario that you've seen a million times, and hell, while that's obviously an over-used troupe in anime, that's not necessarily a criticism. I'm not even saying this premise is bad for a slice-of-life/romance per say, because I've seen anime pull this kind of thing off before, most notably Nagi no Asukara, with the whole huge love-web scenario made even more confusing by vague supernatural elements driving the story from the side-lines. Glasslip however, does a few things wrong right off of the bat.

Proper characterization of your cast is really important before you want to start doing dramatic things with them, and while I get into this more when I get to the "Characters" section of this review, the bland and largely unlikable cast of Glasslip don't help the show's case at all. Dramatic tension isn't so much built up through events in the narrative as much as stuff just kind of happens, the characters wine about it for an episode or two, before the next event on the checklist steps up to be dramatized. The narrative never seems to know really what it is doing. First I thought that the power to see "shards" of the future that Touko and David posses would tie into some thematic center about facing the future and change, but that theory hits a dead-end quick as the narrative continues to do a lot of stuff, yet somehow a whole lot of nothing. It's this nebulous focus that just simply kills any kind of structure that the show may have had, and the series of largely disconnected events that each episode entails fails to have any impact.
Look, I'm not saying that Glasslip had to be about something, because it didn't, not really, especially in the genre it is a part of. Many of my favorite anime are about nothing in particularly: the narratives of slice-of-life anime like Nichijou, Toradora, Clannad, and hell, another show by P.A Works that came out later the same year as Glasslip, Shirobako, could be argued by a cynic to be about nothing in particular. And yeah, maybe that's correct, the events in those shows were also random, sometimes disconnected events of the everyday anxiety of normal people. Despite that though, everyone of those shows had something to say about the nothing of everyday, about the human experience, about the connections between their characters, managing to tie all of that into some kind of lesson or moral for the audience that they could apply to their own days of nothing in particular. So no, Glasslip didn't have be about something. But it did have to say something. And it doesn't. There's no overarching moral, the characters don't really learn much of anything by the end except how not to get on one another's nerves, and the whole sorry affair is just a gigantic waste of time.

Meanwhile, the one part of this narrative that might have been interesting: the ability to see the future in the reflection of objects(a cool and somewhat narratively appropriate idea that I found interesting) is completely undermined by just how contrived the story is, and ultimately makes no sense. Just to be clear, I'm not saying I need an explanation per say for supernatural powers in a contemporary setting, certain stories need the audience to suspend disbelief in order for their narrative to work, and that's fine, stories are allowed to define the boundaries of their own worlds. What I am calling Glasslip out for is that the power itself doesn't operate under any given rules, and pretty much just does what the narrative wants it to do. There's no rhyme or reason for when the visions of the future grip Touko or David, or how the visions present themselves, whether through a corporeal screen or as a full-blown hallucination of varying vividness. At one point, David loses his power to see the future for some reason, and hell, it's not even clear why Touko received the power to see the future when she did. She wasn't born with it, and as far as we know, and hadn't been repressing it. Is this a metaphorical manifestation of teenage anxiety, like what Charlotte did? I don't know. And at this point, this story has become stupid enough for me to not really care either.

P.A Works doing their P.A Works thing.

In truth though, all of this ties into the biggest problem with Glasslip, which I'll talk about more in depth later, but for right now, I guess I'll touch on the few things I did like about this show. While this is more likely attributed to the animators at P.A Works than Urahata, I appreciated the range of expressions on the characters' faces, cluing in the veiwer into what they might be thinking(unless there was some obnoxious inner monologue), and helping to tell the story, no matter how crappy it may be, in a more organic and subtle way. That actually ties into my next positive: the silent storytelling. Many of the best moments of the entire show are when the characters keep their fat mouths shut, like when Touko and David silently lay down in a meadow of grass enjoying the sun and the breeze, a maelstrom of unsaid things between them swirling around the scene. Or that moment when Hiro realizes exactly what kind of person Sachi is(which I can't elaborate due to spoilers, though I'm not sure why I even care at this point), and he simply stares at her for moment in confusion which transitions to disgust, before he walks out of the room without hardly another word, unable to fully process what exactly just happened. Oh, and there's this one chicken named Jonathan who is pretty cool.

The main cast of Glasslip. From left to right: David, Touko, Yanagi, Asshole-McEmo, Hiro, Sachi.

Characters

All of the main cast of Glassip mostly come off as unlikable, stupid, or boring, and that's something that can be attributed to how the story treats them, or to be more precise, what the story makes them do. See, the characters in Glasslip aren't so much actually characters as they are plot-devices in order to serve the narrative, and in many ways, this is the worst parts of Glasslip, the characters have no agency of their own, they only are there to create the drama. Our main heroine Touko is the bland shoujo protagonist for nearly everyone of the male cast(and female to be fair to Sachi) to latch onto and fall in love with, not because they share any sort of particular chemistry or personal connection with her, but because drama will be created as she inevitably turns them down to end up with David. David's character basically only exists to break the group of friends up and create tension. Yuki is only there to act like an asshole to everyone, and for Yanagi to get all upset when he goes after Touka. Hiro... well to be fair Hiro is probably the only character I like in this entire cast, mostly just because he seems to be the only one with truly good intentions. A lovable idiot, Hiro is a simple, tactless, well-meaning guy who just can't help but fall for the quiet, glasses-wearing Sachi(who incidentally is only there to create drama when Yuki isn't around).
While the main characters don't really have anything to do besides from what the story needs them to do as they try to pretend to be people stuck within the extremely rigid personalities the anime has given them, the side characters thankfully have a little more breathing-room, which pretty much instantly makes them more likable then the main cast. Since the narrative doesn't(usually) make them do anything stupid to serve the drama, the supporting cast actually feel like people observing the situation, and the anime actually did a really good job of putting that observation into a family unit. I enjoyed characters like Hiro's older sister, David's parents, and Touko's younger sister the most; just because their sort of realistic demeanors of amusement and understanding watching these stupid teenagers scream their feelings at one another was the closest this show came to being self-aware. I mean, I doubt it was intentional, but it at least gave me the closest thing to enjoyment while watching this show.

The vivid and simple beauty of Glasslip's townscape.

Presentation & Sound

P.A Works are notrious for their stupidly beautiful anime, and Glasslip is thankfully no exception. This is probably the best-looking show I've seen from them disregarding Nagi no Asukara; it's got that feeling of quality that only certain animation studios can make vivid. I could go over the pleasant character designs and the lustrous colors used, but the place I feel the animation really shines is in the backgrounds of the anime. Even without pointers via the narrative, the town where the characters live is so wonderfully realized and drawn with such detail that it really does feel like a living breathing town. There's always a nice landscape in the background to gawk at as the characters do whatever stupid thing they're doing, and there is almost always movement, from birds taking flight in the distance, to cars passing by the characters as they walk to school. It's that sort of commiment that makes this studio stand out among others. It just would have been nice if they had animated something kind of worth watching.

Sound in contrast, is where the aesthetics of this show fall a little bit short, at least for me. The composer: Akito Matsuda, has done a couple of really good OSTs before Glasslip, including but not limited to soundtracks for anime like Hibike! Euphonium, Bokura wa Minna Kawaiso, and D-Frag, but I can't get too excited about his efforts here. Glasslip's soundtrack is heavily themed around classical orchestra pieces, and while I'm sure the OST is a treat for fans of that era of instrumental music, it just isn't for me. Now, I fully realize this negative impression of the soundtrack is due to my personal tastes alone, and I'm sure others who enjoy this kind of music will be delighted by the renditions heard in the background of certain scenes, but even when I take that into account, most of the tracks simply feel much too similiar to each other. Nearly all of the OST pieces use many similiar instruments and follow similiar tempos, and it just makes for a boring listen when you have to go through the whole soundtrack for a review, hypothetically. That said, there were a couple of pieces I felt stood out to some degree. The piano rendition of the song "Toumei na Sekai"(45:12) is rather lovely unlike its vocal counterpart and reminiscent of some of the piano pieces from SNAFU Zoku's OST, and the fast-paced yet somehow intriguing "Tsunagaru Kokoro, Takanaru Kokoro"(36:05) is probably one of my favorite pieces from the whole soundtrack. In summary, while I know that I never was going to like this OST contrary to some people, that fact that even an uncultured music listener like me can find a few tracks to enjoy probably is a testament in itself to well how structured this entire soundtrack is. At the very least, it's much better than most OSTs in a given season, so, you know, I'll stop being a pretentious prick for a moment and give the OST a solid "good".
I got really excited when I saw that nano.RIPE was doing the ED for Glasslip, but I ended up extremely disappointed in that regard. The band has done some of my favorite OP's for the slice-of-life/supernatural genre; I absolutely adore their opening credit songs for Sankarea and both seasons of Non Non Biyori, but Glasslip's Ed "Tōmei na Sekai" is just kind of generic sounding and uninspired, and honestly sort of unfitting seeing how much of the show's episodes end on some sort of dramatic cliffhanger. As for the OP "Natsu no Hi to Kimi no Ko", I can't really say anything about it. It's about as typical as OP's go, and is not even saved by maybe some creative visuals playing into the whole "shards" of future thing, but rather is made monotonous by the boring pannning shots and character vignettes.

Natsu no Hi to Kimi no Ko

Glasslip OST Compilation

Verdict

Somehow, at the end of this review, I need to swing this conversation right back along to melodrama, because really, that's core of why Glasslip is the way that it is. Melodrama is a term thrown around without much care in slice-of-life/romance genre, and sometimes that irks me greatly since I feel it's greatly unjustified. This, is one of the few exceptions.
Fundamentally, nothing in Glasslip really makes much sense, and that is precisely because it's melodramatic, a flaw which you can easily trace to nearly every single integral fault of the story. It was doomed from the moment the agency of the characters were compromised in their own story in order to serve the narrative, and its fate was sealed from the moment that the characters were created reliant on the narrative, because from that point, they didn't take action because they should, they took action because they needed to in order for the narrative to work. Why does Touka's and David's power to see the future fluctuate on how it works so often? Because the narrative said so. Why do they even have these powers in the first place? Because the narrative said so. Why do the character makes stupid and irrational decisions that only begets more drama? Because the narrative said so. Hell, why does this group of teenagers have feelings for one another in the first place, despite not really sharing any chemistry? Because the narrative said so. Why does this show suck so much? Because you, P.A Works, screwed up big time.
Somewhere along the way, I feel, Glasslip forgot to make its characters actually human, and whatever it wanted to do with them later, the sentiment was already compromised. Look, it makes it hard to care when you feel you're watching a bunch of wind-up dolls with water balloons attached to their eyes. It makes it hard to care when these dolls seemingly seek out drama. It makes it hard to care. And so, at the end of the day, I don't really care about Glasslip. I didn't care what happened with the story, or what happened to the characters, or even if everybody would be happy at the end. I just... didn't care. Apathy is the next step after sadness. Sadness is the next step after anger. And anger is the next step after apathy. If a show obviously doesn't care about itself enough to be coherent, why the hell should I put in the effort to find its positives or to recommend it to people who may feasibly enjoy it for some reason? I'm not. Instead, just to spite it, Glasslip gets a dismissive last phrase in this review, because frankly, I've spent way more time in this review talking about the show than it deserves. Glasslip is a failure of romance, a failure of a drama, and a failure of a story. Skip it.

Final Verdict: 4/10

P.S: Jonathan was always the MVP.

Recommended Anime:

Nagi no Asukara

I've already mentioned NagiAsu multiple times in this review, but that's only because it and Glasslip are practically cut from the same cloth. So, if you want to see a similiar sort of story done a million times better in what culminates to be probably the best anime P.A Works have ever produced, this story about a bunch of fish-kids has you covered.

Ano Natsu de Matteru

However, if you're the kind of person who does enjoy these sort of soapbox-drama anime where none of the characters really make sense, Ano Natsu de Matteru is a good choice. It starts off just as bad as Glasslip, but unlike Glasslip, does actually manage to pay off emotional investment by the end to become a halfway decent show.

Well, here we are at the end of the review; hopefully next time I'll be talking about something halfway decent. If for some reason you're interested in checking out this burning bridge for yourself, Glasslip is in fact available for legal streaming with ads both on Hulu and Crunchyroll. It's always good to support the industry if you can.

Goodbye for now guys.

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