Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be embarking on an entirely new adventure, as we make our way through the first episode of Girls’ Last Tour.

I remember enjoying Girls’ Last Tour well enough while it was airing, though I didn’t actually follow it to the end. That’s not necessarily the show’s fault, though – it’s quite frankly just tough to find time for non-Crunchyroll shows in my schedule, as the demands of a weekly column mean I pretty much always have to be looking for new subject matter. The show was a lovely little production in its own right though, and struck firmly in that “quiet, intimate joy in the face of existential despair” niche occupied by shows like Sound of the Sky or Planetarian. I tend to love that particular tonal combination – “the world is a profoundly harsh and unforgiving place, but we still have hope and each other” might well be my general philosophy on life, and so I’m always up for narratives that temper an unflinching approach to illustrating life’s traumas with clear, emphatic sympathy for their central characters. When you couple that with the show’s beautiful environments and consistently evocative tone, you end up with an anime that I’m very happy to return to. Let’s see what there is to discover in the first episode of Girls’ Last Tour!

Episode 1

To open with just a dash of context, Girls’ Last Tour was actually Takaharu Ozaki’s first full series as show director. Prior to this, he’d worked on properties like Occult Academy, Terraformars, and even Sound of the Sky itself, generally as director of photography. All three of those works share an emphasis on muted colors and heavy shadow that seems echoed by Girls’ Last Tour – on top of this, Girls’ Last Tour’s atmospheric, environmentally driven narrative seems particularly well-suited to a director who’s been most involved in cinematography and image compositing. Different styles of narrative reward different directorial specialties!

The first episode title, “Starry Sky/War,” emphasizes this show’s inherent contrast of childlike wonderment and grim circumstance

And we open with the sound and imagery of droplets falling into a pool of water, immediately centering the audience in the lived experience of traversing this shadowed landscape

A progression of pillow shots introduce us to a decaying cavern filled with pipes and rusted metal. “Pillow shots” are shots introduced into a film/show/etc that don’t prioritize the actual subject, but instead highlight incidental elements of the scenery, and through doing so create a stronger sense of intimacy and clearer grasp of a moment’s as-it-is-lived tone. They’re quite common in anime and Japanese cinema more generally, particularly in slice of life shows, where the priority is often on evoking a specific lived experience over following an urgent narrative. It’s one of the things that draws me to anime – I tend to find “what happened next” a less compelling question than “how did that make you feel”

The initial focus on the quiet of this tunnel makes the introduction of our heroines feel like a tonal intrusion, subtly emphasizing how they are strangers in a dangerous place. You can imply potential threats without overtly baiting them simply by positioning the camera so as to echo a potential lurker’s perspective

Ooh, I forgot about this show’s wonderful music score. Love this ethereal chanting as the girls putter through, as if they’re treading through some enchanted forest or sacred place

The heavy shadows and very rounded character designs help conceal the CG here, though it’s still somewhat awkward. Heavily aesthetic-focused shows like this are hurt the most by disruptive CG breaking the tonal illusion

“Quit it.” “I’m sorry.” “It’s okay.” I like the blank affectation these girls converse with. It seems clear in their tone that they’ve been on the road with no one else to talk to for far too long

One girl dislikes the dark and wants to light the lantern, the other argues they don’t know when they’ll next refuel. The show’s central contrast in miniature, childish hope and world-weary pragmatism

The blonde girl is Yuu, the dark-haired one is Chi. Some very nice incidental jokes here that lean heavily on combining rapid cuts with Yuu’s deadpan idiocy. This is the kind of thing that’s really key for slice of life shows, but also inherently quite difficult – making your show consistently funny without burdening it with lots of overt setup-punchline jokes. Normal comedies are generally able to devote all of the screen’s dramatic resources to making jokes land, but slice of life shows tend to seek more a general mood of levity that doesn’t detract from the overarching atmosphere, and that requires finding humor in stuff like the rapid cutaways from Yuu’s silly remarks. As with the scene-setting, slice of life comedy requires a careful and aesthetically holistic touch

Another incidental joke in the contrast of their current fatigued, deadpan tone against Yuu’s visually expressed enthusiasm about initially entering the cave. Finding comedy in deadpan seems like one of this show’s favorite tricks, along with cutting to reactions/punchlines with faster tempo than you’d expect

This show is easily demonstrating how “detailed” faces and “expressive” faces aren’t at all the same thing. These blobby designs actually allow for a very rich range of expressions

The girls fall asleep, leading naturally into a flashback. The show’s generally muted colors mean these filtered sepia flashbacks aren’t much of a tonal disruption

We learn about their “history,” but it’s a child’s view of memory – lots of aggressive loud noises, flashing lights, the persistent churn of the treads, a beloved face fading into the distance. Very efficient stuff that feels simultaneously honest to the characters’ experience and yet vague enough to maintain plenty of mystery

Yuu is eating Chi’s hand

That is some bizarrely well-animated saliva, huh

Chi’s slaps are adorably ineffective. Very nice character animation so far

Like many similar characters, Yuu’s appeal relies heavily on her voice actresses’ ability to make weird noises

I really like how shows like this are essentially exercises in dramatic minimalism. This whole first act has conveyed a clear conflict arc regarding being lost in this underground cavern without ever making it the direct focus

Starting in the cave also makes the reveal of the outside world an inherent hook

“It’s so bright, Chi!” Learning to appreciate the inherent, irreducible beauty of the world seems like a theme, considering this episode’s first half seems to be arguing that traveling through the cave gave these girls the perspective to appreciate the night sky

The saturated lighting and desaturated colors are definitely giving me Occult Academy/Terraformar vibes

You can really feel the sensation of the snow coming down. This is a very tonally impressive show

“What’s gonna happen when the sun comes up?” “We’ll burn to death.” These girls’ aimless conversations and deadpan morbidity feels more true to life than a lot of slice of life dialogue

Oof, these shots opening the second half are gorgeous. I love how these angles emphasize how a decaying metal city is itself a rich kind of wilderness

A slow pan over cans lined up on a wall, letting the implication sink in before the title “War” appears

This weapon of war feels incongruous in Yuu’s hands, and the show understands that. It’s an incongruity anime has essentially mined into rubble over the years, but Girls’ Last Tour’s close tonal approach and believably childish characters help sell the weirdness of this moment

A lot of it probably comes down to the sound design. The mechanical noises of the rifle are far louder than any of the surrounding sounds

The contrast between these girls’ childish affectation and dystopian existence is also echoing some of the appeal of Kemono Friends

“You think a tank tastes good?”

Girls’ Last Tour recreating a K-On! bluray cover with a tank seems like a pretty reasonable statement of purpose

“People long ago didn’t have enough food either, so why did they make these weapons instead?”

It’s a common trick, but watching these girls muse on why people chose to Do War is still pretty compelling. They’re not going for tragedy, they’re just highlighting the absurdity, senselessness, and ultimate emptiness of it all. At the end of a war fought for presumably very important reasons, we’re just left with these girls in the ruins, theorizing about what people in the past could have cared so much about

“If there were three people and only enough food for two, I guess that’s when you’d use your weapon.” ‘Can’t we all just get along,’ particularly from a child’s mouth, would be trite. This show seems to understand that conflict is inevitable, and is merely highlighting its consequences

Please do not give Yuu a minigun

Still very impressed with how well this episode conveys the sense of walking through snowfall. The sound design is really remarkable

Yuu claims the last of their rations, and says she’s taking it while pointing her gun at Chi. We switch to ominous strings, implying there’s an actual threat here, though Chi doesn’t seem terribly worried

Yeah, these girls have no conception of actual violence. They’re just play-acting, which makes the strings feel like a somewhat odd choice – generally the show’s aesthetic choices seem designed to emphasize the feelings of its characters, not provide an ironic counterpoint

The girls wrestling in snow are accompanied by more pillow shots of the rifle and rations, once again emphasizing the show’s central contrast between childish freedom and the harshness of this world

And Done

Welp, that was still pretty damn good the second time! This episode was first and foremost a tone piece, and it succeeded wonderfully on those terms. The atmosphere of both the metal cavern and snowy wilderness was palpable throughout, with both the beautiful storyboards and dynamite sound design working to make the unique sensation of a muffling snowfall clear. It’s easy to slip into maudlin territory when you’ve got innocent children commenting on the senselessness of war, but the dialogue felt natural enough to avoid that pitfall, and the strong chemistry between Chi and Yuu helped sell the show’s intent regardless. This was quite a strong first episode!

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