Momentary Lily

Ever since Hand Shakers, the modest studio GoHands has had a reputation. Hand Shakers was awful because of its characters and story, over-rendered CGI notwithstanding… but every season this studio debuts a new show, the criticism has been a little too predictable. MAL featured an article about this show that caught my eye, and rather than do what everyone else says and moan “bwaaah Gohands!” …I decided to give it a try.


It is a huge, huge improvement over Hand Shakers. A group of girls are hanging out in a very glossy, crisp and clean city- but there are no other people around. They meet ... someone new- a girl named Renge- who is bashful around them and has some adorable funny faces as she fusses about how to introduce herself. Each of the girls is very pretty, beautifully drawn, and with different color hair, stylish outfits, and their own pet phrases. But what you may notice first is- the camera angles.
The camera swoops all around in I suppose GoHands signature style, birds-eye, worms-eye views and all kinds of other angles, but the girls themselves are possibly more animated than anything you’ve ever seen before. Their boobs bounce- up and down and left and right- they move their heads and shoulders around constantly, and EVERY STRAND OF HAIR is moving- and it’s not choppy- it moves like fluid. You can criticize the stylistic choices and the lackadaisical plot, but you can’t deny the characters are beautifully animated.
As the show progresses, the laid back feeling finally shifts to some action and even a shocking character-death that was really very dramatic… the number of people watching the first episode had dropped to a dedicated few by the mid-way point, and all I could wonder was why?

Yes it’s true, GoHands has an offbeat style… more like they lean way too heavily on 3D graphics programs, and someone at the studio can’t keep their hands off the ‘increase contrast’ knob; and for some reason they are obsessed with making cherry blossom trees glow brighter than the downtown of a medium sized city on a Friday night. And the monsters they fight, even the weapons they fight them with- have neon colored glowing liquid LIGHT spewing out of them… if you were vegging out on a typically boring, visually flat episode of Magic Maker and suddenly switched to the middle of one of these fight scenes, I’m pretty confident your eyeballs would catch fire.

But maybe that’s why I love this show so much.
Aren’t people tired of seeing the same crappy 2D drek with the same archetypal isekai protagonists, dull colors, wooden dialogue, and the same unimaginative magic crap in season after season of mass produced slop? What is the real reason you like anime as a medium? The stories? You can read a story in a book. Don’t you want to see ANIMATION???
That’s what this show was made for!
I have a completely different view of it- and the studio GoHands- than I did at the beginning. The reason anime became so popular was that it did radical things western animation didn’t attempt, it had exciting camera movement, (and stories for grownups), action-packed fights, memorable characters and…. loads of cute girls. All of those things are packed into this anime, it is a dazzling overload for the eyes- maybe that’s what anime should be.

I can’t understand the appeal of liking something because it’s flat and boring and safe.
This show is bright, colorful, loud, obnoxious, confusing, and absolutely bonkers-
and that is EXACTLY THE REASON you should watch it.
Now- you CAN look for every flaw in the scenery or point out the direction of the shadows not matching up, or some other pedantic gripe about some background detail. You COULD also sit back and watch the world spin, see colorful girls twirl around and scream while riding guitars through the air attacking some hilariously stupid looking glowing monster..
When it’s put that way, that choice seems easy- I had a great time watching this show and I wish more anime were like it.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Momentary Lily is a complete and utter trainwreck.

On an animation level, it’s Studio GoHands on its signature F Game. Obnoxious rainbow lens flare in almost every scene on top of garish color filters, absurd camera angles which serve absolutely no purpose, and overanimated character models which all compound into complete sensory overload. It’s a complete smorgasbord of visual ideas which don’t cohere in any meaningful way and leave only a nauseous mess in their wake.

The same can be said for the writing, which is often even worse & less cohesive than the visuals. All of the ... characters are cardboard cutouts defined largely by their catchphrase/vocal quirk, such as the one that says BAM BAM, the one that says Kappou, the one that says Guilty, and the one that speaks Gamer, among others. This terrible cast is not helped by the script, which often swings wildly between serious action, slice-of-life comedy, half-assed emotional moments, and intrusive 3-minute chibi cooking tutorials every episode (yes, really) without any sense of tonal balance, and a mind-numbingly convoluted wider plot which also never comes together.

It’s at this point in the review that you’re probably wondering why it’s marked “Mixed Feelings” rather than “Negative”. Well, the answer is rather simple: Momentary Lily is insanely fun to watch.

Yup, it’s one of those classic “So Bad, It’s Good” type shows. It may not be traditionally good art, but one can’t help but be in awe of how hard Momentary Lily fails. Its awful production, while typical of Studio GoHands’ output, is nonetheless a standout next to more traditional failures, and seeing what new assaults on cinematic language the series will hammer out quickly goes from an annoying distraction to a major part of the fun.

The writing, too, is almost endearing in how much it commits to its terrible approach. Whether it be getting blindsided by whatever new nonsensical plot turn the series will throw at you or just laughing along at how dumb its catchphrase-overloaded excuses for banter are, there is genuinely no end to the ironic fun one can have with this show.

If you’re looking for a traditionally good, well-made show, you should probably avoid Momentary Lily like the plague. But if you’re just looking for something dumb to throw on at bad movie night and turn your brain off to, then this might just be the one for you.

Momentary Lily - GoHands, is this your Hand Shakers for the 2020s? It seems like it; it feels more like it.

Look, I'm not saying that studios are allowed to have their own freestyle of production, but it feels as if, as time passes on, those distinctions become more of a blessing or a curse, depending on the intentions, of course. And for studio GoHands, for a time, they were just like any other studio out there pumping out stereotypical 2D animation adaptations of source materials like 2009's Princess Lover! and 2010's Seitokai Yakuindomo...that is until they found success with 2012's K Project, and the decision ... to go full 3DCG is officially implemented, which has been the outcome of striking and bizarre controversy ever since 2017's Hand Shakers. And that philosophy still remains true in the regard of original anime from the studio till now, with the release of this season's Momentary Lily: a show about a post-apocalyptic science fantasy adventure of dealing with robotic invaders...as much as the aspect of cooking makes sense to fill stomachs first, then focus on the issue at hand.

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." - Hippocrates

With Momentary Lily being the post-apocalyptic setting of survivability against all odds, I can see how such a story of people having weapons to fight against these monstrous robot-like beings destroying the face of the Earth proves detrimental to humanity's survival for the foreseeable future. In this case, the group of girls of Yuri Kawazu, Erika Kodaiji, Hinageshi Usuzumi, Sazanka Yoshino, and Ayame Sakuya, who were then joined by the unknown girl of Renge Kasumi, were just wandering around all alone with her newfound Andvari weapon, decimating the Wild Hunt robots who roam around the city they're in to kill anyone that's in their way, trying to figure out the secrets of their powers and pasts. In fact, this mirrors Hand Shakers in the way of people partnering together to create their Nimrod weapons to fight against the many groups targeting each other in the race to become God...which, for some reason, as the story (if you could call it that) progresses, I kind of find myself more wanting of Hand Shakers than this show, which, in its execution, was just as wishy-washy, but at least the former show had a somewhat streamlined story despite issues in its storytelling, rather than the latter, which feels like the plot premise kind of took a backseat to the entire CGDCT-esque parade due to uneven pacing.

"We all eat, and it would be a sad waste of opportunity to eat badly." - Anna Thomas

And that problem is pretty much escalated when Renge joins the group of girls who also are in the same predicament, just that they have more control thanks to their Andvari weapons, which enable them to get OP and eliminate the Wild Hunt. As much personality as the 5 girls all have that we can all afford to single out which girl stands out the most, there's just too much detail going into them that it feels like there's no central character of note (well, if you remove Renge from the equation). Renge trying to rally the girls together is an effort that I will acknowledge trying to get some sort of consensus for a survival story of the 6 of them, even if it means having to get down to the heart of the matter: food, because this is what she's genuinely good at, even if it does and doesn't serve as a plot device to the entire story at hand. It's these CGDCT-esque things that show the amount of effort the writers have when exploring character depth but are by no means showing character development, which, sadly, there is little to none of this, bringing about the incongruencies of mediocre storytelling at its finest (which GoHands is always, without a shadow of a doubt, infamously known for).

"Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate." - Alan D. Wolfelt

With GoHands, it goes without saying that they love (and I mean ABSOLUTELY LOVE) quality over quantity, or rather, excessive things like their signature complex camerawork, particle effects, and aggressive postprocessing. This has been the bread-and-butter of the studio since Hand Shakers, and if you thought that you could survive Summer 2023's offerings of Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta a.k.a The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses (which exactly showcases the best of GoHands production) and the underrated Dekiru Neko wa Kyou mo Yuutsu a.k.a The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today, that's at least a stark contrast to what GoHands does for their original anime, which has the budget to go all-out in their own style. And Momentary Lily just feels like another Hand Shakers that's just made to impress just about the loyalists of overexcessive 3DCG.

Even the music is somewhat overboard this time around, not the plain ones like GoHands's other projects in the past. I thought that Hanabie's metalcore punk-rock OP song was just the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard when it comes to Anisongs, but then again, when coupled with how GoHands loves to just infringe their signature style, it kind of ironically makes a perfect fit for an overhyped OP song. miwa's ED song is just forgettable, though.

Look, you know fully well what to expect going into a GoHands show that is completely originally made from the ground up, only to come out being just as underwhelmed as do their original anime projects of the past (Hand Shakers included). And that's the result of Momentary Lily: a show so ridiculous and over-the-top that it makes you question why any production company (in this case, Shochiku) would have the finances to back an anime project, let alone a GoHands one. This practice will sadly never go away in years to come because GoHands found its formula to rake in any effort they can, even if it comes off as more of an annoyance than anything.