Momentary Lily – Episode 1

Content Warning: fan service

What’s it about? Strange living machines known as The Wild Hunt appeared one day, erasing every human they touched. Now, a girl named Renge wanders the empty city with no memory of how she got there, searching for other people. She’s surprised to discover a group of girls equipped to fight The Wild Hunt… and horrified to see how badly they’re eating. Using her handy camping stove, Renge whips up a wholesome meal for her fellow post-apocalyptic survivors.

“Girls Do Stuff in a speculative setting” is a genre I’m fond of, from the surprisingly cozy post-apocalyptic road trip that is Girls Last Tour to the gentle witchy whimsy of Flying Witch. Slice-of-life downtime that highlights the importance of the little things—food, hobbies, crafting—can make a world feel lived-in and characters feel richer. The question, of course, is whether a series can balance its supernatural elements with the chill vibe it’s going for. The contrast between an epic sci-fi fight scene with life-or-death stakes and a cute, funny cooking segment could be pretty jarring, for example. And an example of that is the premiere of Momentary Lily.

Honestly, it’s not too bad—Momentary Lily is at no point going for a down-to-earth vibe, so it’s not completely ridiculous when it does a hard shift from cool robot battles to an upbeat, cartoony scene of teenage girls having dinner. It also foregrounds this juxtaposition right off the bat, throwing the viewer straight into the opening credits with a song that mixes growly, heavy metal-style singing with chipper anime-girl voiceover. There’s a slightly surreal, fever-dreamy quality to this episode that means basically anything could happen and I’d say “sure.”

Part of that is definitely the visuals. And you can’t really talk about a GoHands show without talking about the visuals—the studio is arguably best known for their, er, inventive style of imagery and animation. While not as headache-inducing as some of their earlier works, there’s certainly something dizzying about watching Momentary Lily. The camera often tracks the characters and moves frenetically, or throws them at Dutch angles or into a fish-eye lens. The backgrounds are shimmery and warped just a little, often blended with 3D photorealistic elements. This isn’t necessarily bad, since it all builds to make the action scenes very energetic and the empty, robot-ravaged city seem otherworldly. Where I think it actively becomes a problem—or at least, a barrier preventing me from enjoying the show more—is the characters.

I’m far more used to watching seasonal anime that’s strategically still, the animators clearly saving their resources by limiting characters’ movement. It’s almost uncanny, then, how much the characters in Momentary Lily move—especially because this motion is often in places you don’t expect, and in ways that really don’t add anything to the characterization or storytelling. It would be one thing if a character was constantly fidgeting or gesturing and moving their hands. Instead their hair seems almost alive, constantly shifting, flipping, fluffing up, or puffing out around their faces with a sense of kinetic energy that doesn’t match the rest of their bodies.

That’s consistent across all the main girls, but the group’s Big Sis seemingly has a whole extra animation rig set up in her chest. She only needs to exhale slightly and her bust jiggles like there’s an earthquake localized entirely inside her blouse. It’s silly fan service, so I’d be critiquing it for that anyway, but it’s also surreal to look at and genuinely quite distracting at times.

I bring that up because the characters in this seem like a real case of style over substance. They’re pretty archetypal so far, with an emphasis on them being friendly and cute in their own ways: one is the aforementioned Big Sister type (she introduces herself as such, accompanied by one of her many jiggles), another is the Very Serious Glasses Girl, another is the group’s designated gamer who talks about everyday life in terms of getting debuffs and losing HP. One says “bam, bam!” a lot and that seems to be her main thing. Renge has no memory of her life before the Wild Hunt arrived, so at least she has a narrative excuse for having minimal traits and a surface-level personality.

And that’s a real shame, because this kind of setting could be a great opportunity to really get to know a dynamic, complex crew of female characters all dealing with the collective trauma of an alien (?) invasion and the high-octane horror of fighting monsters every day. You get to see them being badass, but you also get to see them sitting down to soup and bonding. Plenty of potential for character building there… and yet there’s very little in this first episode, and everyone feels pretty flat. Now hey, that could change as the show goes along and we get past the initial set-up, but given the direction of this premiere I’m not super hopeful. If only the character writing was as lively and dynamic as everyone’s hair!