The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Momentary Lily

Robotic invaders wiped out all life, but Renge fights to survive using her powers. With no memories, she roams the city until she meets five other young women, each with unique abilities. Together, they make the most of their lives, cooking delicious meals between battles with mechanical monstrosities. As they uncover the secrets of their powers and pasts, they find strength in their friendship.

Momentary Lily is an original series by animation studio GoHands. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Oh, GoHands. No matter how hard we trash you in the ratings, someone out there must be into what you're doing. I can almost respect your dogged determination to ignore all principles of animation and cinematography because you (collectively) are clearly creating art the way you like it. You overuse cinematic techniques and angles meant to be utilized sparingly, robbing them of their traditional meanings and rendering them useless as signifiers. Your camera whirls around so much, the video stream quite literally cannot keep up. You desaturate your colors so everything is kind of brownish, even in genres that traditionally demand bright shades.

As a critic, I cannot endorse this. While I respect, even enjoy unconventional creative choices, there is a cinematic language that exists for a reason: to help audiences understand, even subconsciously, the story that is being told. This is not just done via the script and acting, but with the camera angles, shot composition, and color grading. Anime uses limited animation traditionally, not just because of a lack of resources but also because the choice of what is animated and how tells its own story. When your girls' hair twists around like dozens of snakes with every head bob, what are we supposed to take from it? That the Gorgons were septuplets instead of triplets? It's fine to be playful with language; that's what art is. But what you are doing is sheer gibberish. It is the babbling of a madman who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. It is aphasic.

Your scripts fare little better. Clearly you approve of the quality of work Tamazo Yanagi has turned out, as he's written scripts for six of your shows now. I can't help but notice, however, that GoHands is the only studio he's worked with; his first show was HandShakers, an original show that has been held up as a bastion of baffling story choices since the day its first episode aired eight years ago. Maybe he's just a really likable guy and pleasant to work with. Maybe he has seven snake-haired children he needs to feed and you'd feel terribly guilty if you fired him. But let me tell you, the script on Momentary Lily is not working. The characters almost have decent chemistry, but the way they speak is so artificial, so determined by character archetypes that they feel they were created with a TVTropes checklist. The mood swings from the hangouts to the battle to the cooking time are jarring.

But again, you're not making anime for me, are you? Like the master of outsider cinema Neil Breen, you're making anime for yourself and the cult of people who will watch your work, whether for sincere entertainment or to dissect it in bafflement. In that, I wish you well. Now to take some painkillers for this headache you gave me.

There is a blissful but woefully brief moment during the premiere of GoHands' latest act of animated terrorism that you might be tricked into thinking they are in on the joke. The show's OP is just as visually incoherent as anything else the studio has produced in the last decade, but the obviously intentional contrast between their cutesy cast of magical girls and the screamo power metal music playing over the montage suggests that the creators of Hand Shakers are fully aware of what their work does to most of their unsuspecting viewers. To watch a GoHands production is to rip your eyeballs from your skull and throw them into a violent mosh pit of spite and rage that will only leave you with little globlets of mush and viscera to pathetically pour back into your faceholes. After all of these years, none of us can ever say we were not warned.

Sadly, once that OP is over, the only thing that remains is the actual show that GoHands has set loose upon the world, and you will not be surprised to learn that it is absolutely unwatchable. Now, it might be possible that the premiere will seem somewhat less unholy than the studio's worst efforts. Their manic, nausea-inducing cinematography tactics are relegated mostly to the opening fight between our magical heroines and their glowy enemy things, after all, which must mean that GoHands have at least learned something in the last eight years, right? The story is also lacking in the utterly bugnuts pacing and characterization that made shows like Hand Shakers and W'z impossible to take seriously; instead, we just have a cast of typical, color-coded magical girls who banter and snack their way through what seems like most “normal” episode of television that GoHands has produced since K was a thing over a decade ago.

Do not be misled by this show's attempts to deceive and manipulate you. The person in charge of storyboarding the action scenes at GoHands may have been forced to down enough tranquilizers to kill a herd of elephants for this production, but that doesn't mean that GoHands has ceased in their efforts to create the most busted-looking dreck this side of EX-ARM. The terrible compositing against uncanny CGI backgrounds is as garish looking as ever. The already overdone character animation is constantly being overshadowed by the studio's insistence on slapping random lens-flare and color filters over every miserable frame, and that's in addition to the genuinely insane elements like the sky box of clouds that is moving at 120 MPH for no discernable reason. When a shot lasts longer than a second or two, which feels rare, it becomes impossible not to notice that the whole freaking thing is framed in Dutch angles. It's as if the only movie that the crew at GoHands have ever seen is Battlefield Earth, and they thought it was a goddamned masterpiece. I already griped about the character animation, but special attention needs to be paid to how every single one of the girls in this show has their individual hair strands animated as if they are mere moments away from transforming into the writhing snakes of a Gorgon's head.

For someone like me, who struggles to handle overstimulating visual noise on even the best days, even the most middling of Go Hands anime is the audio-visual entertainment equivalent of experiencing a full-blown panic attack. Even if this wasn't the most tedious and mediocre script that the studio has yet produced—which it absolutely is, by the way—their dogged insistence on sticking to their abominable house style would guarantee Momentary Lily an instant spot at the top of my Seasonal Shit List. I would rather sit through several more hours of gormless isekai gruel than endure another minute of this show.

If there wasn't such a thing as “over-animated” before GoHands, there certainly is now. Everything about the first episode of their latest offering is in constant motion – the sky, clouds, hair, that one girl's breasts…it's so overstimulating that it could be marketed as a way to give someone a migraine. It may be an attempt to replicate the way that the real world is hardly ever truly still, but even then, there are moments that give the appearance of being free of all motion, even if that's just our brains seeking a way to break. GoHands does not seem to understand the need for such respite.

That's without even getting into the story, which is nearly as rough. It may just be me despairing of how the names mix Celtic and Norse mythology (the weapons all have Norse names, while the Wild Hunt comes out of Celtic lore), but the rest of the episode is just as mixed up. We've got a post-apocalyptic world, teens who can wield weapons against it, and then, randomly, a cooking segment, all attempting to share space while the characters talk really quickly. It's so odd as to almost feel nonsensical, like a focus group gone mad was the ultimate deciding factor when writing the script, or as if dice were thrown with different story elements written on their sides and the ones that landed face-up were used. I suppose we should be grateful that “underwear,” “kaiju,” and “roller skating” weren't the ones we got; “school uniforms,” “robots,” and “cooking” are quite weird enough, thanks.

There are a few points that are at least a little interesting. Renge's amnesia and her good relationship with the tiny robots are more engaging than the larger group of girls, each of whom seems to have mistaken a thing they like or say for a personality. It's also worth wondering if only teenage girls were spared from the aliens' depredations or if there are other people out there, possibly of different ages and genders. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the world will be explored in more detail in later episodes; this one smacks of the show throwing everything it feels it has to offer in our faces in a desperate bid to hook us, and it may simply not be trusting its audience enough to take things more slowly.

Regrettably, this first episode had the opposite effect on me. It feels like a screaming smorgasbord of too much movement, hair blowing in an incessant wind, and breasts moving like they're filled with air. As with other GoHands shows, Momentary Lily has left me with a migraine and a sick feeling in my stomach. Whether that's motion sickness or the result of the sugary colors and voices, I will leave it up to you to decide.

There's a line from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park that was running through my head on repeat as I watched this episode—a line that perfectly encapsulates the biggest issue with this episode of television: “[They] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

More than anything else, this first episode of Momentary Lily feels like a commercial—not for merchandise but for the studio itself. It's like the show is just an excuse to show all the different things GoHands can do with their 3D animation—especially when it comes to camera work. There are almost no normal, static shots in the entire episode. The camera is always either moving—be that pans, arc shots, or shaky cam—or has some kind of atypical feature like a telephoto lens, low angle, or Dutch angle.

Don't get me wrong, it's truly cool to see that they can do these things in anime. However, none of them are used correctly. You see, there is a kind of visual language when it comes to film. Take the aforementioned “Dutch angle,” where the camera is noticeably tilted at an angle. It is typically used to subconsciously inform the viewer that something is off or abnormal—that the whole world is suddenly off-kilter metaphorically. Similarly, the “shaky cam” is a technique that makes you feel like you're right there in the action. However, in Momentary Lily, these techniques (and many more) are used seemingly at random. So, instead of a clear message, we are assaulted with visual gibberish (if not a notable case of motion sickness).

You might have noticed I've not really talked about the plot or characters—and that's because there is very little to say. The six girls that make up the main cast are so one-dimensional they can each be described in a single word: “Gamer,” “ditz,” “sister,” “shy,” “serious,” and “gal.” They basically introduce themselves as such. And as for the plot, it's simply that robots have exterminated all of mankind except these girls, who can use strange, superpowered weapons. After 22-minutes, I literally know nothing more than that.

Needless to say, this is a terrible show on nearly every level. While you might be tricked into thinking it looks okay from screenshots alone, the moment you see it in action, you'll understand it for what it truly is: visual vomit accented with one-note characters and a paper-thin plot.