Anime Original by P.A. Works
Simulcast on Crunchyroll

Premise

With her future ahead of her, Touko Fukami is learning how to be a glass artisan while her enjoying her final Summer break with her friends. Their routine is interrupted when a mysteriously surly boy transfers to their school.

Jel’s verdict: Fragile Future

Pretty, inoffensive, and kind of boring could pretty much describe any of P.A. Works’ recent original series (Hanasaku Iroha, Tari Tari), and as Glasslip opens up to a shot of a sleepy seaside town washed in warm colors and soft music you can’t deny the show falls right in line with its heritage. Throw in an energetic and quirky heroine and one of Marlin’s trademark Love Centipede™ chains of unrequited crushes and it certainly feels like we’ve been here before. About the only wrinkle in the process is some oddly placed splashes of abstract directing, they type you usually see in comedy anime. The fancy charcoal filters and chibi gag character inserts are few and far between though and feel odd and out of place in the otherwise subdued setting. I appreciate the effort, but I’m not sure it works.

Basically Glasslip is going to come down to story and writing and whether or not they can put any new spins on something we’ve seen plenty of times before. I was disappointed that there was almost no attention given to Touko’s passion for making glass as her path to becoming a professional artist would make for a much more interesting story than a bratty boy coming in and making her old friend jealous. Still, it’s only one episode and I am confident Glasslip will have a lot more to offer in the future. I am just skeptical about whether it will be worth the effort or not.

Marlin’s verdict: Walking On Broken Glass

I was wholly unimpressed by Glasslip. First off, it always makes me skeptical when an anime can’t perform well on its art or animation. Quite constantly we see stills and photoshop shortcuts instead of actual work, and what animation there is seemed to be heavily outsourced. There is a point where all five of our main characters are talking and yet the entire scene is encapsulated by a still of them. It completely ruins any illusion to have us just look at a painting of them instead of just having them talk personally. Plus, this dynamic seems almost identical to Nagi no Asukara, so I’m not quite sure what the draw is supposed to be. This initial plot line of everyone getting chickens is just stupid, and our characters seem interested in each other without any firm foundation given as to why we should care. It’s not a good sign for PA Works when the best way to describe their newest outing is it’s like another PA Works show, but worse.

Life’s verdict: Pretty, Maybe Smart?

Glasslip certainly is pretty. I was expecting this to be more of a slice of life about blowing glass than a love centipede. I am still hopeful that we will get more of a focus on Touko’s artwork and glass blowing in future, but this introduction was fun enough for what it was. What was it exactly? A love centipede that introduced the cast all at once while being sure to let us know who their crush is. I did like the weird way Touko is taken by Kakeru’s philosophy questions in the form of caring for chicken. The question itself isn’t all that interesting, but it gives me hope that this show will try to do something smart with it’s themes. There is also the way Touka sees the world during the fireworks. The fact that Kakeru see the world the same way way she does makes me wonder if something supernatural is going on. I don’t know how long this show will keep my interest, but there was enough here to ensure that I’ll watch the next episode.

Aqua’s verdict: Heart of Glass

P.A. Works launching an original anime about a happy-go-lucky girl in a sleepy village during summer is starting to become a bit of a tradition as of late, with Glasslip being the fifth or sixth show by the studio to look, sound and move along exactly like Hanasaku Iroha did. Constantly defaulting to Kanami Sekiguchi’s big-headed, wide-eyed, spindly art style isn’t doing the studio any favours, however, especially since no show the studio has made since Hanasaku Iroha has shown any ambition to outwit the standards set by Ohana and co. Last summer’s Tari Tari managed to make a case for itself by culling half of the episodes — and half of the accompanying Mari Okada bullshit — yet sadly enough, Glasslip filters so much actual content out of the established formula it feels almost like a parody of P. A. Works’ earlier work.

Glasslip is a show about nothing, not in the usual ‘haha, so random’ way of being ‘about nothing’ but legitimately, at its core, devoid of any sort of premise. Hanasaku Iroha was about a conflict between three generations and the value of hard work. Tari Tari was about five kids trying to get a choir together and save their school. Glasslip is about (again) five high schoolers who go to a festival and take care of a chicken for one night. Period. Characters are dragged into the ‘story’ with but a quick subtitle naming them, waltzing onto the scene like the audience is supposed to know who they are already and disappearing before any sane viewer has managed to distinguish them from any of the other dozen characters. Glasslip‘s pacing is glacial at best, rife with often bizarre dialogue and amateurish padding, and worst of all, it is entirely wasted on meaningless conversations and half-hearted humour rather than establishing anything, be it character or plot, rendering the hints at more complex characterization that may be there utterly forgettable.

At its worst, Glasslip lives up to the ‘slice-of-life’ name almost literally. It is an entirely random part cut out of an entirely random group of entirely random people’s everyday lives, with no incentive to tell you who they are, what they are doing and why they do whatever they are doing. It lacks the motivation to owe any viewer anything, all in favour of an atmosphere that cannot exist on its own. The sense of nostalgia P. A. Works has built virtually its entire career only works if it is inhabited by people the public can emphasize with. Yet like the sleepy villages its studio can’t seem to move out of, Glasslip is an isolated affair. It doesn’t seem to care to offer outsiders like us anything but a superficial glance at its beauty. So what’s the point in giving the attention it doesn’t seem to want?