Yes, the entire thing is basically a framed narrative, each layer becoming progressively "wider":
Layer 1: Dead Mother Explosion. Yuuta shoots Dead Mother Explosion, a movie about his terminally ill mother, which ends with her hospital exploding while she is dying.
Layer 2: Goodbye Eri. Dead Mother Explosion is shown at the school festival to universal disapproval. Yuuta is determined to take his own life, but meets Eri, who gives him a new reason to live. Together, they shoot a second movie, Goodbye Eri, that he would show at next year's school festival. We find out (more on this later) that Yuuta's mother was actually very picky about what Yuuta recorded of her and how he did it, and cruel to him when he didn't get it right. Goodbye Eri is comprised of Dead Mother Explosion plus all the footage of Yuuta, Eri and Yuuta's parents—including footage (well, panels) you think is candid and/or was not planned to be shot.
Layer 3: Sayonara Eri. The real Eri dies, Goodbye Eri is screened at the school festival to universal acclaim. However, Yuuta is unsatisfied with the finished product and becomes consumed with improving upon it, even after becoming an adult and creating his own family. Then, his family is killed in an accident, and he once again records a suicide note before going to hang himself in the abandoned building where he and Eri used to watch movies. He meets a young Eri there, who confesses to being an actual vampire and being content with having Goodbye Eri to remember her and Yuuta by. Once again dissuaded from committing suicide, Yuuta walks away from the building, which explodes.
Layer 3 is basically the manga itself i.e. everything you, the reader, sees on the page. You are reading a collection of scenes that have been curated by its creator, picked beforehand to establish a particular narrative with twists and turns—just like how Layer 3's Yuuta constructs the narrative of the story between Layer 2's Yuuta and Eri.
Layer 4: the artist. We do not see anything about this layer, but know that it's there because the finished product we are seeing (Layer 3) was put together by someone. However, we only see the result of this curating process, what was selected of "thousands of hours of footage" (i.e. many possible drafts), and nothing outside of it.
Every new layer overturns something about the layer before it: how Yuuta painted a much better picture of his mother, how the explosion wasn't just because he "liked fantasy", and, of course, the revelations about Eri "actually" being a vampire. It is all built on twists, and each one announces a new layer.
* I'm using Goodbye Eri to refer to the in-universe second movie, and Sayonara Eri to refer to the real-life manga. |