Goodbye, Eri

When someone is recorded onto a picture or a video, they’re there forever. That snapshot of them is effectively immortal until the snapshot fades away. They can trigger emotions, feelings, that you thought you’ve all but forgotten. But at the same time, that snapshot doesn’t embody every aspect of who that person was. Goodbye Eri delves into what it means to be remembered, and what the truth behind the memories is.

Through Yuta’s eyes, we see each panel of the manga like a frame in a stop motion film. The panel's shape is static, and there are minimal changes from one frame to another. The art gets reused throughout the manga, and one scene can be the same art as another scene, like the final meeting with Eri and the other movie scenes. It's reminiscent of traditional animation techniques, where each component layers onto the picture. This effect added to the cinema-like atmosphere of the manga.

The "shaky cam" effect on panels was interesting. I haven’t seen it in any other manga before. Fujimoto uses these blurry moments to highlight when Yuta's emotions are heightened, whether it be when he is scared of all his classmates hating his movie, anger at his mother, or surprise when Eri collapses. I thought it was a nice way to show how Yuta felt.

The little details that made me appreciate how Fujimoto built up the relationship between Yuta and Eri, like the callback to page 70 on page 154. I thought she was pointing at the screen, but on a reread while writing this review, I realized that Eri was holding two fingers up at the screen whenever a character scores a win. After Eri died, Yuta did that as a sort of tribute to Eri; he won, he made a film that his classmates liked.

Yuta isn’t the perfect protagonist. He runs away all the time. He runs away when his mom dies, he runs away when people don't like his film, he runs away from Eri’s news of her impending death, and the death of his own family. He’s human. Running from his problems is part of who he is. A central theme in this manga.

Yuta seems to realize that what he was missing in the film wasn’t a perfect cut, he couldn’t deal with the loss of Eri. But the Eri he meets in the end isn’t his Eri. It’s someone else. While Eri says it’s beautiful that she’ll always remember Yuta through the movie, Yuta realizes that the Yuta in the film is an idealized version. The Yuta in the film isn’t the “true” one, and the Eri Yuta remembers, doesn't exist anymore.

The final "It's missing a pinch of fantasy" line leading into an explosion was a nice callback to the explosion at the beginning shows how while so much has changed in Yuta's life, some things don't change. His first instinct is still to run away. But this time, it’s away from the thing he couldn’t let go.