Goodbye, Don Glees!

Teen misfits Roma, Toto, and Drop call themselves the “Don Glees”, an informal name for their backyard adventures. One day, when the trio gets blamed for a nearby forest fire, they set off into the woods to prove their innocence. As disaster strikes their expedition, tensions flare between the friends. Director Atsuko Ishizuka follows up her critically acclaimed series A Place Further Than the Universe with her first original feature film. With luminescent animation and lush backdrops, Goodbye, Don Glees! is a tender coming-of-age story about the fearlessness of being young and the bittersweet journey of self-discovery.

When you buy a world map from Japan, it’s Japan and the Pacific Ocean that are in the middle. So I saw Iceland on the far left-hand side. So it really is like the end of the world, especially for these kids. I wanted to emphasize the fact that they are actually going somewhere that they have no idea about, that being the end of the world. And I think that is important for these characters because they are both living in the countryside. That’s their entire world, but the world is so much bigger, and Iceland is the symbol of that… So they physically learn what the world is like and how different the world they see is. That’s what I wanted to say with this story.

Director Atsuko Ishizuka, from an interview on Crunchyroll