Alright folks, settle in, settle in. This may be the post-apocalypse, but that’s no reason to be impolite. Today we’ll be returning to the altogether excellent Girls’ Last Tour, whose last two episodes have gone well and above the standard set by the show’s introduction. Girls’ Last Tour has been an enchantingly atmospheric and poignantly personal story from the beginning, but the show’s last two episodes both dove into heavy and complex themes with remarkable grace.

In the show’s third episode, the introduction of fellow traveler Kanazawa served as an opportunity to explore the things that drive us to keep living, and the importance of some sense of purpose. In a world like Yuu and Chi’s, you can’t simply drift through life in a comfortable neutral – every day is a struggle to maintain the necessities of life, and thus every day is a fresh question as to why you struggle at all. Kanazawa’s hope lay in the map he was building, but when that map was lost, he was forced to reconsider his perspective – and ultimately, Yuu’s offhand “sometimes good things will happen” provided the answer. Hopes and goals are important for keeping us focused and moving forward, but life has its own rewards even in the absence of a specific purpose, and as long as you keep living, you will eventually find new experiences that were worth living for.

In its fourth episode, Girls’ Last Tour tackled the purpose of living from a different angle, as it questioned what we can hope to leave behind. Yuu and Chi’s acquisition of a camera naturally facilitated a conversation on impermanence, as the girls reflected on how a photograph might hope to outlast their own adventures. That in turn lead into their discovery of one of mankind’s most enduring wards against oblivion – the gods and temples we create, and the tales we tell of living for eternity in those gods’ favor. Yuu and Chi’s idle theorizing on the tenets of that temple served as a natural illustration of the fact that even our most sacred truths and impressive creations will eventually lose their meaning, and no longer serve as a reminder of anything but themselves. But Yuu and Chi don’t need gods to find purpose; sharing lunch in the shadow of an old god, their conversations once again emphasized that simply living and caring for each other is meaning enough, no matter how impermanent.

In short, Girls’ Last Tour has been directly grappling with some of the heaviest and most fundamental questions of human existence, and doing it in such a way that it never abandons the aesthetic wonder and personal warmth of Yuu and Chi’s journey. I don’t expect every episode to be such a piercing thematic treatise, but I’m very impressed by the show’s ability to navigate these topics gracefully, and always tether its points into the active adventures of its heroes. Let’s see what’s in store in Girls’ Last Tour’s fifth episode!

Episode 5

We open with a ubiquitous anime image, as a water droplet falling into darkness creates ripples of blue light. Has anyone done an etymology of the anime water droplet?

The surrounding environment creates its own soundtrack as the camera pans over leaky pipes and whirring motors, a percussive groundwork that is then built on by the show’s overt strings

Yuu comments that there’s a great deal more running water and electricity here. These sounds are a natural way to portray the sense of a still-living city, in contrast to the dead buildings of the lower levels. Cities have their own living organs, even after people have gone

Yuu’s perception of “a lot of people” in terms of a city population is a thousand. She has no context for a living city, apparently

“What are houses for?” “Well, you couldn’t live without a house.” “But we don’t have a house.” Their dynamic is so good – Yuu asks these basic, practical questions that simultaneously function as fundamental philosophical prompts, and Chi responds with common-sense, culturally approved answers that only serve to highlight the ridiculousness of our assumptions about life. It’s like a blobby little series of Socratic dialogues

Yuu once again proves her unintentional wisdom by asking if their vehicle is a house. Her lack of knowledge also means she has a lack of preconceptions, which means she can actually arrive at some fundamental insights basically by accident

The sound of gurgling water and angles of the shots, consistently emphasizing all the open doors around them, once again create a sense of a lurking threat, drawing us back from the neutral safety of their conversation

Beautiful shot of this room they find, lit by the evening’s amber light

“Living in a place like this is the stuff of dreams” is contrasted against a shot of their tiny window and huge cinderblock apartment complex. Dreams are always relative

A charming sequence of them imagining a bunch of furniture into existence in their new home

And the camera pulls back to admire their fully furnished home, the overhead light facilitating a dreamlike haze of saturation. They don’t have these things, but they have each other to support their dreams of home

Our final shot of their “house” is almost entirely grey, emphasizing that its warmth and comfort were carried by the girls themselves

Translators doing a great job of capturing Yuu’s awful house puns

Some genuinely surreal imagery within this city – a bunch of cinderblock apartments standing on the top of single metal poles, like something out of post-industrial Dr. Seuss

Some awkward chronology here – this sequence in the daylight is essentially a prologue to this chapter which then cuts back to the previous night, but when three chapters are combined into one episode and this serves as the middle chapter, this framing device feels a bit clumsy

This city has such a clear sense of solidity and physical presence to it. There’s never any obvious aesthetic delineation between the ground, buildings, and sky; the cohesive color palettes and texture work, along with the crumbled geometry of the buildings, always make it feel like a real place. Some shows can get away with mediocre backgrounds, but this one really couldn’t

The character outlines shift in color, and the architectural linework becomes thicker and more clearly sketched, as we move into Chi’s dream. Her dream literally looks like a rougher and more cartoonish drawing

Yuu is Huge

“Listen up Yuu, it’s really bad for me if this sways.” Convincingly dreamlike logic, as Chi just sweeps past the fact that Yuu is a giant now

This dream is really letting the animators stretch their muscles, as we get more fluid squash and stretch from the characters, and a great deal more embellished illustrations and diverse color work in the backgrounds

“I wish I could have shown this to grandpa.” A rare moment of reflection on the past. I wonder how much we’ll learn about their prior circumstances

All of Chi’s dreams unsurprisingly feature her being tormented by a giant Yuu. This whale segment is amazing

The three episode segments are definitely a bit more clearly defined this time – there’s no clear thematic throughline uniting them, and this middle segment has both a prologue and an epilogue

“The Sound of Rain” is already living up to its title – these early moments emphasize the difference between the rat-a-tat plunk of rain on metal helmets, versus the hollow ringing on their vehicle, versus its gentle patter on the ground

Their current environment is essentially a forest made of steel pillars

As they shelter from the rain, Chi reads a book to occupy herself, and Yuu… bangs a metal stick against the wall. Yuu is a difficult traveling companion

Now they’re just beating each other with the stick. Ah, friendship

That water droplet moment from the episode’s opening is reprised. Symmetry of symbolism is a pretty common way to try and impart a sense of cohesiveness on an episode that doesn’t naturally possess it

The girls invent a little percussive orchestra, gathering objects for drops of rain to tap off of. It’s a dramatic fulfillment of Yuu’s promise from two episodes ago – life may be difficult and not really possess any inherent meaning, but eventually beautiful little moments like this will happen

“Maybe this is what they call ‘music?’” What a simultaneously sad and hopeful sentence. These girls have no context for what music is, but cannot help but reinvent it, because music is too fundamental to be lost

And as in the opening, the natural percussion of their environment is eventually supplemented by the overt soundtrack. Small moments of joy in the course of their journey

And Done

Oh wow, that was lovely. Beautiful crescendo at the end there, and terrific use of sound design all through that episode. This was indeed a return to the show’s earlier scattered vignettes, but they were very nice vignettes – all three played with the show’s art or sound design in compelling ways, and served as a natural illustration of the lessons from the third and fourth episodes. Even without any big philosophical arguments, it’s hard to complain about an episode that ends on a beautiful moment like that, especially when that episode also contains Yuu as a giant fish. Girls’ Last Tour is good culture.

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