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.