IKIGAI DAYS

Goodbye, Lara is a 15th anniversary project by studio Kinema Citrus and it is an original animation that isn’t based off a manga, light novel or visual novel

Story

The story is inspired by the “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Anderson with their own modern twist on this story. I’m sure most of us are familiar with this Disney classic! But please don’t let this deter you from skipping this series

The overall main plot of this series centers around our main protagonist Lara, trying to find the true meaning of love in the human world to save her family and the mermaids, and follows the struggles she goes through to understand this. The backstory of this series is that humans and mermaids have a bad relationship with each other, but mainly more so for mermaids having a deep hatred for humans!

Character Development

What this series does really well is the character development of all characters that appear in the series, from Himeka who Lara met during school and they specifically did a great job with Lara’s sister, Lisa and Grace the Witch

The series mainly follows Lara throughout the series and you see how much she has developed over time. From the start, she was naive, eager and wanted to find true love quickly and her thought was that true love was in the romantic sense. Then nearing the end of the series, you see how much she has developed and started really thinking deeply of what true love meant to her, and this series really does well in exploring these different types of love that she encounters

I will also praise the series for simultaneously developing the characters and also portraying why the mermaids hated the humans so much through this. As at the start, you wondered why did the mermaids hate the humans so much, but it made sense on why they did after watching more

I’ll talk about two characters, which i really loved the back story on, which was Lisa and Grace, the witch

If we take a look at Lisa, it showed why she hated the humans as she was taken captive by them and was used as an exhibit for humans as entertainment for years, like, “look, there’s a mermaid”. So you can sympathise with why she hated humans so much. Tying in with this, they introduced Kota, the anglerfish and I feel who is the unspoken MVP of this series! Whilst we didn’t get that much screen time of him, he was always there for Lisa and the one who saved her from being held captive from the exhibit when the place burned down. This is also one way where they portrayed love in the romantic sense for Kota.

Then we have the supposed villain of the mermaids, Grace the witch who started this whole thing of Lara becoming human. We spent an episode showing the witch’s past of falling in love with a human, only resulting in being betrayed like Lara. This betrayal unfortunately lead to the death of her sister. Her sister was Lara’s mother, which adds to the fact on why Lara’s father just hated the mermaids so much. You can’t blame him for that unfortunately. Despite what happened to the witch, she didn’t inherently dislike humans, and wanted to believe in them and this reflected in her giving Lara the potion to become human

Animation and Music

A really strong point for this series is the quality of its animation and I would say it’s the best we have seen in years of this caliber. Yes, JJK and Demon Slayer have great animation, but this is unique in its own level. It’s reminiscence of a Studio Ghibli style, whilst bringing nostalgia of the color palette of anime back in the 90’s

Kinema Citrus, the studio behind this series really did outdid themselves and there was also cel animation used in the Opening of the series. Cel animation is where they hand draw it and it’s really rare these days and I’m glad they did that. You can really tell the care, attention to detail and the love they have put in this series, from the smallest details of Lara’s tongue being stitched to her ears being like mermaid, and them changing when she takes human form. I know this sounds silly, but even the animation of water was beautiful, and a fun fact is that the they had a water artist, Naoki Yoshibe!

Other than the animation, the music and bgm was really fitting for this series and my fav was the OP, it was sang by a band I haven’t heard in a while called Ikimonogakari, which most of you might know from the famous Naruto song, Blue Bird

Overall thoughts

If you couldn’t tell now by reading this review, I really loved this series and if I was to have one small complaint, it would actually be the somewhat anti-climatic ending to this series. In saying that though, I had a thought about this when writing the review but after thinking through this more, it was really befitting for a series of this nature and the point wasn’t to have some climatic and crazy ending but leaving it in a somewhat open ending with Lara heading off. Which fit in with the name “Goodbye, Lara”

I will say that some fans who were looking to ship Mari and Lara might be a bit upset, but I never saw this series as a Yuri and something more deeper with the meaning of what is true love. True love I feel comes in all sorts of forms which I feel this series did well in exploring and it’s not always having to love someone in terms of being a boyfriend and girlfriend situation. The show really did well tackling this and ending in a way that I really appreciate

I would really recommend this series if you have watched a lot of anime, and really looking for something that isn’t fast paced and unique, whilst something that is slow paced and you can appreciate the series for what it is This review ended up longer than expected, but hope you enjoyed reading it!