Goodbye, Don Glees!

There's an implicit pain in growing up. It's the sting of knowing that there are new certainties in life, that possibilities are fading, and that's the change facing the secret club known as the Don Glees. Maybe the changes have already happened: After all, Toto (Kaji in the original Japanese language version, Nick Wolfhard in the English dub) has already left his tiny farming community to attend high school in Tokyo and has come back with a new haircut and a new attitude. Not that he'd tell his best friend Roma (Hanae/Adam McArthur), who still smells of manure from working on his uncle's spinach farm. But then Roma changed everything by inviting a new kid, Drop (Murase/Jonathan Leon) to join their two-man losers' club.

In Goodbye, Don Glees!, the first original anime from Atsuko Ishizuka (No Game No Life: Zero), innocent teen friendships and the hope for one last adventure are tenderly explored as a wildfire sends the trio into the woods – but most importantly, into a delicate exploration of growth, of dealing with mundane situations that seem impossibly huge and impossible challenges that somehow you can work your way through. Suffused with the golden glow of reminiscence on sun-dappled leaves, Goodbye, Don Glees! finds space for big emotions, and especially for the boys, who live in a culture where expressing those emotions is frowned upon, to navigate their growth and change on their own terms.

And those terms can be challenging to reach and accept. Ishizuka comes from a female perspective, but there's a sympathetic perspicacity to her outsider's look into the inner lives of boys, as the trio shifts and adjusts to each other on an adventure that takes a wild (but not too fantastical) turn. Most insightfully, she doesn't always depend on big speeches for the boys to express their emotions: instead, she gets the strength or silent bonds, and the roaring adolescent impulses that can seem overwhelming but can be transitional. What starts as the death of childhood becomes the birth of something new, something bittersweet, but something shared. Maybe, as the Don Glees learn, growing up isn't so bad.