If you're familiar with Atsuko Ishizuka's previous original anime, A Place Further Than the Universe, then you're already prepared for a good deal of Goodbye, Don Glees!'s appeal: dorky kids on an adventure, not to a far-off fantasy location, but to an existing area on the world map with a great deal of personal significance to them. I really appreciate Ishizuka making refreshing adventure stories for anime, even if Don Glees! isn't quite the home run A Place Further Than the Universe was.

Part of Don Glees!'s problem is that its scope is a bit too broad for a film's length. Although the marketing made a big deal about the story heading to Iceland, the film actually spends most of its runtime on what feels like the prologue: a small-scale adventure in Japan's countryside. When the story does eventually expand overseas, the shift is so dramatic that the film instantly loses its down-to-earth charm. It also doesn't help that the third act of the film feels distinctly rushed, zooming straight past the adventure and exploration in favor of a heavy-handed emotional climax. If the story could have taken its time to build up to that moment, it probably would have been more effective.

It's a shame that the plot of Don Glees! didn't quite click with me by the end because I loved the characters from the get-go. They feel like real people from the way they move, and their designs change believably over time. The dialogue is a particular highlight here: naturalistic, with a focus on joking and bantering. It's easy to buy these boys as friends when they're willing to push each other's buttons. Like with real life friendships, they sometimes go too far in their ribbing and genuinely hurt each other's feelings; the scenes where they reflect and try to make up for it ring true to life and are all the sweeter because of it.

The film's first half is also delightfully funny. An extended scene where the boys fool around in drag is perhaps one of the most hilarious iterations of this gag I've seen in anime because it's all presented with such good-natured energy. That their goofing around directly leads into the film's conflict is a sign of deft storytelling. The drone they were playing with is blamed for a forest fire, leading the boys to briefly reflect that maybe they should have thought about things before they started playing around... but it doesn't lead to enough introspection to stop from them doing something even more ill-considered: venturing into the mountains by themselves to retrieve the drone's data in order to clear their names. Fittingly, it's only when things go awry on their adventure that they're confronted with the messy feelings of growing up.

As a tried and true coming-of-age story with a focus on finding the spirit of adventure within the mundane, Don Glees! would have worked perfectly fine. But the film does not stick to this premise, perhaps out of the insecure thought that a feature film must escalate its plot. The emotional turn was foreshadowed well in advance, but that doesn't stop it from coming across as an unwelcome development in a film that felt perfectly comfortable with its initial dramatic stakes. It also means that everything that happens from that point on is a lot more predictable, with the only real surprise being a cinematic contrivance near the end. It makes for a suitably climactic moment in the abstract, but never feels entirely earned within the narrative context.

I went into Don Glees! expecting to call it a masterpiece, but in the end, I'm not too hung up about the fact that it didn't reach that level. The appeals outweigh the disappointments, and it offers so many things that are relatively rare in anime, like down-to-earth adolescent male friendships and a globe-trotting adventure. Although I can understand why a film like this wouldn't be a hit at the box office, it will be well worth watching if it ever ends up on a streaming platform. I'm still as much a fan of Atsuko Ishizuka's style as ever, and I'm really hoping that this trend of giving creative directors original projects can continue for at least a little while longer.