さよなら絵梨

GOODBYE, ERI

ONE_SHOT

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
1
RELEASE
April 11, 2022
CHAPTERS
1

DESCRIPTION

With his mother dying, Yuuta attempts to capture her last days on his phone. After her death, Yuuta heads to the roof of the hospital to commit suicide, but a meeting with a strange girl leads him on the path to making a movie.

(Source: Manga Plus)

Note: The one-shot was compiled in a special volume, released on July 4, 2022.

CAST

Eri
Yuuta Itou
Yuuta no Chichi
Yuuta no Haha
Yuuta no Tomodachi
Tauchi

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

AshenCant
100/100
Digital Loss and Grief
I take a lot of photographs. Last year I took a combined four thousand, three hundred and thirty-four - which averages out to about eleven or twelve a day. Prior years are about the same. I spend a lot of money on SD cards. Almost all of my friends I’ve talked to about Goodbye Eri have reflected on their own lives, their own grief, and their own relationship with archival and art.

The line between performance, creation, and falsification is a thread that links everybody in our current age. As people of all stripes get better at holding cameras, at editing, at correcting, we all collectively understand on some level that there’s so much to the world you never see in the photos. A vista that spreads out in every direction away from you gets flattened into a mere two dimensions, and an expression you hold would fall apart in an angle mere degrees to the left or the right.

Fujimoto arranges the panels here in what feels like screenshots from a movie, or maybe storyboards. Unbroken scenes persist in the mind and in the memory, the tops and bottoms of the frame absorbing the entire page only when he wants them to. Overtly aping film through 21:9ish paneling (that still brings to mind 4koma as much as it does a screen) would come off as stiff and limiting by anybody else, but the easygoing dialogue and weighty subject matter make it readily flow.

And its inspirations do feel incredibly filmic - the premise feels very cinema verite, the blurry digital cameras as a Japanese middle schooler navigates loss and mass media feel very Lily Chou-Chou, and I cannot help but relate Dead Explosion Mother to I Think This Is The Closest To How The Footage Looked.

Remembering the truth is something that takes work. It’s something that you only see in those little moments you’d never think to jot down or record, those frozen conversations that stretch into infinity. Eri forces those into being, dragging strangers into movie marathons, asking to re-record idle conversations, turning pain into something that makes everybody except the sufferer cry. Even afterwards, he can't help but try to tighten it up, re-edit it, and make it bigger and smaller and clearer and safer all at once. It's easier to understand it from there, in something you can replay and rewatch and remember. But, in the end, you have to say goodbye to her.

There’s a sort of “stickiness” to this stuff - it’s much easier to remember the things happening around those photos, even without the original files. I recorded a funeral. The people around me lit lanterns and cast them into the sky. I promised to share it with everybody. My SD card broke on the drive home. Nobody ever asked me for a link.
Maybe it should've ended with a big CGI explosion.
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Ry0h
100/100
Explores numerous themes in 200 pages which is incredible
This review will contain spoilers and my thoughts about the One Shot STORY
Starts off with the main character Yuta filming various moments throughout his and his parents lives as we learn his mother is dying and she wants him to remember her through all the recorded videos. She dies at the hospital but Yuta runs away and doesn't film her dying moments. He then makes an edited movie based on the footage of his mother to screen at a school festival but at the end of the movie he makes the hospital explode which makes everyone hate his movie. He feels guilty and was about to commit suicide but he meets this girl named Eri who got him to go to an abandoned building to watch movies with her so he could learn how to make a better movie as she wants him to make a movie that will make everyone cry next time. Eventually, he makes a movie based on her where he describes Eri as a vampire to make the movie more interesting. Eri dies at the end and everyone who watches the movie loves it but he feels it's missing something and he kept re-editing the movie all the way from being in school to his adult life where he has a kid and a wife. Yuta then gets into a car accident with his family where he is the only survivor. After feeling hopeless he goes back to the abandoned mansion which is a special place for him because of Eri. He is shocked to find her watching the movie he made on her and she tells him she is a real vampire and every 200 years her brain dies but her heart lives and her previous self leaves a letter on how to live her life. Even tho Yuta points out she outlives everyone she will know Eri is happy because of the letter she has and the movie Yuta left as she will remember herself and him from the movie. Yuta realizes what was missing from the movie which is an explosion, and the abandoned building gets exploded.
CHARACTERS Yuta
The first movie he creates shows the good parts of his mother when in reality she was very mean to him as she was a TV producer. He spends the majority of his time making the movie on his mother which he thinks is very good but he lets everyone's opinion decide that how he ended the movie was wrong. When he makes another movie based on Eri everyone loves it but he truly felt something was missing which was the explosion at the end. This shows that you will only truly be satisfied/happy by doing what u think is right or want to do. Also he was so obsessed with re-editing the 2nd movie that he took his family life when he was an adult for granted as he lost his wife and kid in a car accident this shows that you never know when you can lose something dear to you or you're own life, that you may not always see what you have right in front of you.
Eri
She doesn't let Yuta know that she is a vampire at first because what she really wanted was for Yuta to decide for her how she will remember herself and the memories she spent with Yuta, even when she dies again and comes back and long after Yuta is gone as well. Since she is undying she wanted someone and something to cherish forever.
Yutas Mother
She was depicted as very kind in the film Yuta made about her but in reality she wasn't very kind to him and the reason Yuta shot the videos in the first place was not to remember her but she wanted to make a TV documentary of her fight against the illness she had as she thought she would recover from it. She was actually always berating him in reality and we find out in her final moments she called Yuta useless for not filming her death. This shows that how people are remembered or who they truly are can change depending on the people you ask basically it shows different points of view about her.
Yutas Father
He is full of regret as he knows he should have done something about how Yuta's mother was treating Yuta and he feels that he was the one who actually ran away from his wife's death and his son as he realized that Yuta's film made him remember the good moments about his wife but he inadvertently contributed to his sons suffering.
ART
The art was consistent throughout and most of the panels were wide and went from top to bottom to make it feel like scenes and cuts of an actual movie and the full page panels would depict major moments well.
OVERALL
Some ppl might feel different about this from me but I think it's very powerful and impacting for a one shot.
Going into this one shot I didn't expect it to have this much that you can pick apart from it but it comes from the genius mind of Tatsuki Fujimoto and I think it solidifies why he is a top mangaka from our generation.
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bonnorcott
100/100
How we choose to remember
A few days ago I had a discussion with a good friend about how I react to media emotionally. I’m quite young, and my media experience in general is limited, but in the past year or so, anime and manga have been the primary forms of visual art I spend my time with. I’ve grown to enjoy writing about anime, sharing my reactions and analyses to a few people as a way to really allow what I watch to get under my skin, and draw the most I can from it. I get serious emotional fulfillment from this analysis, and I wanted to know in particular why anime could make me feel such strong emotions.

The discussion managed to cover some things I think reach me closest on a personal level in art, in particular touching on works which don’t care to depict reality, but rather express reality through abstraction. The most emotionally resonant feature of art to me is the verisimilitude of fantastical imagery, sound, and ideas which deliberately present as fictional, but fundamentally express real human emotion. In short, a work with a pinch of fantasy is one that touches me the most, as the phrase is repeated several times in Goodbye Eri.

This manga primarily toys with this exact idea of something fantastical in art expressing the truest feelings to us. Eri initially connects with Yuta’s movie because of an “uneasy balance of fact and fiction”, which she picks out due to his inclusion of a huge explosion at the end of this real footage of his mother’s slow death. The real truth of this analysis is found later, when it’s revealed that Yuta’s mother tricked him into believing she was dying, so that he would film an affecting documentary of what she believed would be her recovery.

Going back and looking at the initial pages, this is painfully obvious, Yuta’s mother dramatically narrates her own death, and desperately calls Yuta in to film her most “painful” moments. According to Yuta’s father, she was not the person Yuta’s film portrayed her as. She was not kind or gentle, but Yuta chose to cut that all out, arranging his record of her life to show her most beautiful moments. Despite the movie fundamentally being a lie, and a piece of fiction which didn’t reflect even the original footage of the woman herself, Yuta’s father feels that the movie perfectly captures his wife as he would have wanted. The movie touched him for not attempting to be a “real” depiction of the events and people recorded by Yuta, but instead a moving portrayal of his own feelings for the woman he lived with, despite her deep and outstanding flaws.

Eri was also not a particularly kind person, apparently alienating most people but Yuta and one other friend, but Yuta chooses to depict her as caring and passionate, and alter her appearance on film to her own liking. Again, Eri’s other friend expresses no annoyance at this dishonest portrayal, and is grateful that she can be remembered in this light.

When we take photos or videos of our lives, part of us always knows that these records are sensationalised, not a full picture of the turmoil there might be behind the scenes. Goodbye Eri is a reminder that we often seek out this sensationalised nostalgia, sometimes connecting even more with the most distorted depictions of reality. Whether it features giant robots or huge explosions or not, it’s easier for us to understand fiction than reality. That’s one of the reasons that animated shows can help people cry at and come to terms with their own traumas or feelings, fictional novels help people understand their own identity better, and music, a language of expression based on metaphor, is so powerful. Some of us just need that pinch of fantasy.
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