Goodbye, Eri

"You guys... Did you know...? Life is beautiful, bright, and pure. To anyone considering suicide! Don't throw your life away! We all die one day. You should give life a try until your number comes up. Wishing you all well. This is Yuta, signing off. Thanks. Goodbye."

This shit is so meta. Tatsuki Fujimoto the madman that you are...

There are some creators that just speak you personally and Tatsuki Fujimoto is that creator for me.

You can tell Fujimoto has spent a lot of time thinking about why people create and why other people engage with those creations. Both here and in Look Back, he asks the question why do we even bother with art when there are so many more important things constantly happening all around us. And the answer he comes to is that ‘well, it's personal.'

Everyone gets something different out of every piece of art. Sometimes that's something similar to our own, or very different, or even contradictory, but all are valid. Even time can change what one person takes from the same piece of art. Life is chaotic and impermanent and our creations are like a memorial to a specific viewpoint in time. Also Fujimoto is a master at juxtaposing heartfelt emotion with really dumb funny stuff to surprisingly meaningful effect.

I can't wait to read any and everything Tatsuki Fujimoto puts out over his career.

My relationship with pop culture links the modern arts with fragments of my life. Cinema (with Movies, TV Series and Animations), Literature (among Novels, Comics and Books) and Video Games (without forgetting everything which could be declared as part of Pop Culture) are glimpse of eternity inside our existence, other than motivations of community, discovering new people, making new friendships and living the development of artistic moments. Goodbye, Eri takes exactly this meaning of infinity and turns it into an instrument for talking about multiple original arguments, rarely used in modern manga. The little fantasy of our life, the expectations destroyed by reality, the idealization of important figures of our life arriving at peaks of meta-narrative I rarely have seen inside this medium, going beyond it in creating a true compendium of what Cinema aspires to be. The story focuses its attention on Yuta, a boy in love with creating films, with the mother asking for videos of her life until the last moments, forced by a terrible illness. All the material created by the boy becomes a scandalous movie, whose presentation in the Festival of its school is slowly transformed into a way of making fun of the boy. When Yuta decides to end his life, he meets Eri, whose passion for cinema shows the kid clhe has the abilities for creating another project, this time around the mysterious girl. As it seems a normal slice of life, Goodbye Eri excels in creating twists, bringing the genre in lots of different directions (from dramatic moments to fantasy glimpses, with surprises and complete breaking of the screenplay rules). The creativity of Fujimoto explodes into a marvelous mosaic of ideas and messages, in which every single phrase counts, seeking for the last perfect scene, a searched closure for readers and for the protagonist itself. No one in Goodbye Eri appears as it seems, or at least as it is shown by the lenses of a camera, despite those moments appearing as more real than the madness of what happens in the absurd and death-linked Yuta's life. Because in the middle of the depression of never leaving the world, never truly loving its limitative nature, and the existence of constantly perish visions, only explosions create a sort of shock, and in this way, giving sense to everything.

FINAL VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐