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Hey Fred! Gimme a Little Mermaid taking place in the contemporary world, but hold the prince, we’ll make it so the mermaid won’t be in love with him.
Hold the prince?
And hold the evil witch, she’s not really gonna be evil but rather misunderstood.
Hold the evil w-?
Hey Jimmy! Gimme a Little Mermaid with nutn!
Nutting??
Ok no, truth is Sayonara Lara does keep the original story but rushes through it in its first episode, and to be honest it doesn’t do a bad job at it, keeping the basics and even featuring moments of silence, letting the visuals do the job. It’s not like it can’t be done in such a short runtime, Russia did it in the 60s with the most serious tone and the darkest aesthetics out of all the versions I’ve seen of it, which is why I consider it the best of all.
The thing is that there is in fact an older anime version of the tale done in the 70s. Andersen’s Ningyohime (that means mermaid princess) was called, and like the most famous version of all, it was a musical comedy for the most part. By now it’s obviously outdated in terms of both visuals and audio quality, but its short length of barely over an hour and staying faithful to the original tragic ending makes me consider it worth watching it at least once.
Then the Disney version became the most famous of all and distorted the image of the original almost completely, replacing it almost entirely with a musical romantic comedy and even changing the tragic ending for a happy one that led to some very hated sequels. But it also had the best visuals obviously and Ariel, Erick and Ursula had more personality and charisma and were more memorable than the casts of every other version I’ve seen.
So after that, Sayonara Lara asks what would it be like if the mermaid was revived in a contemporary world and society? And she was a fish out of water both metaphorically for a theme, and in this case also literally. Well, that was also done in the past in the Aquamarine live action movie from I believe…2006? But that version was easily the worst of all because it also lacked core elements of the original story, the mermaid adapted to the different world very easily and the plot played out like a typical Usanian highschool comedy with even the group of mean girls bullies, what a drag.
So even though Saynora Lara seems to be the least creative version of all for doing things that were already done in the past, it is also quite innovative in its approach. First for its comedy around the protagonist being lost in a contemporary society, but in a cutesy funny way, instead of a wild funny way like Yuru in Yomi no Tsugai or if you recall it, the protagonist in Kuromukuro, and most likely more that I’m not remember it right now. The same mermaid that was amazed by human creations in the modern era that inspired her to make contact with that species even going against her own, is now scared of the technology, vehicles and houses of the contemporary era.
In that regard, Sayonara Lara also likes to play around with some common anime tropes, and more specifically romcom tropes. For example, at the end of the first episode, the protagonist is about to fall on top of another girl from the sky like in several romance and harem shows, but the latter punches her in the face. Later on the main character comes to find common romance tropes in movies, both happy and sad, and how fiction does not reflect reality, as a love between secondary characters that she thought was destined to be ends up with the two of them going out with other people, it was the classic childhood friend girl not getting with the boy trope done right.
This last part is also relevant for the themes of the show, as Lara learns that her idea of true, destined love is not real or not the way she thinks it is and thus despite desperately trying to find it she is not successful at that no matter how much she tries to force it to happen, things just won’t take form in a fairy tale or just plain fiction-like manner. In that regard, Sayonara Lara is not much like Little Mermaid, but closer to the musical romance comedy drama cartoon and live action hybrid movie Enchanted from 2007. But where that movie chickens out near its end and plays conveniently by the same rules it was poking fun at, and even got a way worse sequel decades later, Lara takes it to another dimension of theme exploration. What if that love, in its forced artificial invention, became harmful, both for the protagonist and the supposed love interest? And I don’t mean that just metaphorically, as said infected love takes the form of a literal fish-like living dagger that attacks others and even grows to a gigantic thing that tries to eat them. So the love that couldn’t flourish becomes rejection and aggression and even makes interacting with others afterwards hurtful due to distrust. At one point it seemed like Lara was the real villainous character of the story and not anyone else, what a concept would have been if the anime followed it through.
On a related note, and since I’ve already mentioned Yomi no Tsugai before, let’s talk about the theme of human and non-human relationship. In that series, the supernatural creatures make a contract with humans to help them and are devoted to them by nature, whereas they don’t comprehend why humans could fight, hurt and betray each other. In Sayonara Lara the merfolks creatures besides Lara fear, despise and reject humans, seemingly with no reason, but as we are shown more backstory then yeah, it’s made clear that they do have a sort of justified reason to feel that way, whereas most humans hate the aquatic species back, and did it first, seemingly just because they are different and non-human. That’s not the case for all of them of course, it’s not like the show tells you that nature is right and humans are a plague or something like that like some supposed woke naturalists and/or activists try to push instead of attacking the real source of the problem which are big corporations, and in turn replicate the ecofascist speech that serves said big companies and go against common people. No, of course and a central topic and theme is that Lara does find worthy of trust, good humans that are not like the rest, and thus not all of humanity deserves to get a resentful attitude, distrust, fear and hate directed towards them.
But let’s not divert much further and go back on track to move away from the themes onto the actual plot and script, that is where the issues begin. Initially Lara is scared to live among humans, the family of the deuteragonist, and tries to run away, breaking a lot of stuff in the process, but gets used to that idea and starts to chase that true destined love and starts working in a bakery, which works in a quadruple sense. First it retains her cute and wholesome side for the audience, second it helps her pay for what she broke, third it serves in making her understand the ways of the contemporary society, and fourth it helps her in her objective to find more people and thus her intended true love, even if that doesn’t exactly work in the end.
It is not related to anything but I don’t have anywhere else to mention it, I liked that Lara lives with a family in a cramped room and the power even goes out during an episode, a rare thing to see in anime full of spacious rooms even if they are set on small or poor houses or the countryside or whatever.
Going back to the script, after the time skip, the supposed villain turns to a pet of the deuteragonist, and if you wonder why no one does something about a girl talking to a fish is because no one knows about that because she is a loner with some drama after losing her mother, hey this is anime after all. And for why the villainess is like that…plot reasons revealed late in the story.
Something that bothered me in the beginning is why Lara would listen to the witch after what happened to her the first time and why would them try to chase love, the thing that destroyed the entire species after failing to obtain it the first time, but it’s not like she has and had other options anyway and that mirror did show the final moments of the merfolks, but it could have been another manipulation of the witch for all the main character knew.
There is a severe lack of reasoning about certain things, like why are the merfolks made of light or why does love produces light stronger and stuff, it’s basically like that because of fantasy, but whatever it’s ok, the series is fantasy, a light one at that, and based on a fairy tale, so let’s let those things slide. So all things considered, there’s an attempt to maintain an internal logic, even with the light and unexplained fantastical elements.
Although what I said about the theme exploration might have made it seem like a pure drama, Sayonara Lara is certainly more of a wholesome comedy during its first episodes and was pretty decent at that. The only parts I didn’t get is what is Mari’s drama and objective supposed to add to the whole story, and why the people move past the occasional but regular destruction of the bridge so easily. This is not Fate where public knowledge can be manipulated nor Yomi no Tsugai where a whole bunch of side characters have supernatural cleaning abilities, the surviving merfolks don’t possess that level of influence and power to explain that, but oh well, it’s Japan, things get destroyed over there regularly due to natural disasters and shit, I guess.
Around episodes 7 to 9, however, you start to notice that every episode seems to want to end with some kind of cliffhanger and build something big to come. Most of the episodes keep being simple and chill slice of life, but all of a sudden it takes a dramatic turn at the end of each episode, with no strong followup afterwards. Lara introspects for a good portion of an episode to decide to find her new love, then almost another entire one to decide that that’s not her true love, well why didn’t we just merge the two of them and save some screentime then?
When we arrive at episode 10, dramatic things happen way too fast all of a sudden, which don’t let the emotional stakes play out organically. This leads me to another big issue which is the next episode, the 11, recontextualizing the witch to be misunderstood instead of evil, and if anything Lara’s father being more of a true antagonist of sorts, which isn’t all that original, as plenty of movies do something similar these days, Disney live action remake of the Little Mermaid included.
The real problem is that she was not fleshed out in the slightest beforehand. You should flesh out a character before you try to twist the information and image of them, and you should do it before you take them out of the plot. It’s a recurrent narrative issue with plenty of anime and manga doing something similar, like Boku no Hero Academia or Kimetsu no Yaiba giving backdrops in the middle of the action thus interrupting the flow of the story for the former and as villains are dying for the latter, or even Hokuto no Ken or Saint Seiya for two old similar examples, as far as this issue is concerned. Even without that, why was the witch acting cryptic and mysterious and refusing to explain anything to either Lara or her father? Why did the writers wrote her as a no real evil villain, when she acts like that throughout the whole series? It feels forced and easily avoidable. And since we are talking about that, why was that whole backstory shown to the deuteragonist through the mirror? It feels as if it happened that way just because the story needed the protagonist to be at another place at that moment.
As an extension to that, there are like two different antagonistic characters at least in theory, but everyone remains passive until the final two episodes, it’s as if no character tries to achieve what they want or prevent from happening what they don’t want, until the show is about to end.
The conclusion suffers from the same thing as the rest of the second half, it has depression, a death, a resurrection, a change of mind and perspective, a realization, the message of the show being directly delivered, and a huge power fixing an ecological phenomena, all in one episode. I wouldn’t say it was bad but definitely would have benefited from lasting at least two episodes. Also, lol at all the yuribait leading to nothing once again. The year was full of actual lesbian anime, go watch those and stop falling for bullshit, people, please. At least it was far more subtle this time, through directing and storyboarding and not the script itself. What I am in favor of is the message, as I got sick and tired of anime and fiction in general acting like love is the only motivation in the world and even then only one type of love, the romantic one. Sayonara Lara says fu-, actually no, it gently rejects its proposal and goes its own way and does its own thing, you love to see it.
What stands out the most from the anime and what made it somewhat known in the first place was the visuals. It is not the first anime in recent years to go for a digital recreation of retro-like aesthetics, but seeing the other ones (Magical Destroyers, My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s, and in this same season, Red River), it is easy to tell that this anime captured the character designs similar to those of old, the warm colors and the darker lighting and shading the best, and without sucking balls completely as an anime. Not only that but everything from artwork to backgrounds and special effects look polished and charming. The character designs are otherwise simple and without much variety, and the animation is not all that good, because the series doesn’t need it to be, but the overall result is very good nonetheless. There were plenty of very well animated and directed shows this year, I’ve been noticing.
The audio department is pretty good as far as sound effects and voice acting goes but the music is the really good thing in here, with its symphonic score. Too bad the anime doesn’t play it much, and instead repeats the little “Lara, Lara” chorus chant considerably. The opening and ending are both pretty in visuals, tell a lot of the story and character dynamics and backdrops without spoiling anything thanks to good storyboard and directing, and even the songs, which I guess would be labeled as symphonic pop, are quite good. Also, you don’t know how pleasant it is to see a band from two decades ago like Ikimonogakari being still around and not making complete trash songs like others in the same boat, hear that Flow? Uverworld? V8? Goddammit. Also I think the last episode used a special opening, and it was a calm, kind of quiet, almost ambience music like tune. I want that released publicly as soon as possible, please.
Bottom line, what seemed to be a mistake of a premise for being derivative was given an original enough spin and with a lovely production and atmosphere, resulted in a pleasant watch in its first half that was thematically more than meets the eye and as far as the message goes, it concluded fine. The problem is the script which in the second half suffered a lot from rushed events and turns and the mishandling of the character colouring, coming up way too late in the story, and a finale that was overstuffed for its own good. If you want an emotional experience, you might be pleased with this anime, if you want something more complete and concrete and well put together, perhaps not so much.
5/10
