Spoilers Below. Anime that deal with the decline of humanity are rather rare and when they exist the human race usually goes out in spectacular fashion. A godownswinging approach if you will. Girls Last Tour though is an iyashikei which puts it in rare company indeed alongside just a handful of other properties most of which never made it outside of the manga format. Were it interesting only on the basis of its genre rarity GLT would be merely vaguely interesting but it combines its subject matter with its genre in some thoughtprovoking and at times genuinely surprising ways. While the older Record of Yokohama Shopping Tripone of GLTs few peers in its peculiar genre/subject matter intersectionoften emphasized a world of technology being slowly reclaimed by nature Girls Last Tour takes the opposite tack a technological megalopolis that seems to have subsumed all nature entirely in the third episode when the girls encounter a dead fish Yuu has no idea what it is and Chi is only passingly familiar yet fallen into ruin regardless. Another example of this is the fourth episode. The temple the two stumble upon that lights up the city is filled with artificial plants namely lilypads which rest on a glass floor filled with metal fish sculptures all meant to resemble a giant koi pond but actual organic life is nowhere to be found. When the girls finally do come across a living organic being another fish much later in the series there is only one quite possibly the literal last fish on earth and it is attended to by a squarish robot and a strange mammalian creature they encounter later turns out to be biomechanical. Theres a fair bit of BLAME a much more violent postapoc anime in its set design. Yawning chasms broken and sometimes colossal machines and weird architecture give GLTs world a touch of disconnectedness from our own reality and really theyre just damn impressive to look at. Around episode 6 is when the show genuinely comes into its own. Iyashikei as a genre has always been hard to define but the episode called Takeoff is a masterclass on what sets the genre apart from similar but more conventionally narrative types of media. Chi and Yuu become lost in a sort of desertlike area where metal poles protrude from the ground and the Kettenkrad breaks down leaving Chi unable to repair it. Here they meet Ishii a woman who lives in an abandoned airbase and seeks to build a plane to leave their massive city. They help her and in turn she fixes the Kettenkrad. Much of the episode is spent on the interaction between Yuu and Chi and when the time finally comes for the plane to take off a long genuinely goosebumpinducing flight sequence with a beautiful soundtrack that almost reminds one of Enyas Orinoco Flow is dashed when the plane begins to crumble in midair not a minute after taking off. Ishii survivesour protagonists watch her parachute safely to the first level of the city belowbut crucially all of this the Kettenkrad being fixed and Ishii being removed from the narrative altogether resets the status quo to zero. This is certainly deliberate Yuus singsonging the word hopeless only nails the point home and is part of the point of this sort of art. Something failing to succeed does not mean there was no point in trying simply doing GLT tells us is an end in of itself. Really this is a central theme of the show on the whole and many other examplesbig and smallcrop up throughout the series. The Spiral segment of Episode 8 is another case in point our protagonists make their way up a massive spiral ramp not unlike the inside of a multilayer parking garage scaled up a thousandfold and are at one point forced to detour over a rickety bridge that collapses as they cross it. Really the two brush with death surprisingly often and its here that GLT takes an interesting and slightly different approach from most other iyashikei. The concept of the endless everyday comes up a lot when discussing this genre and the broader slice of life umbrella in general but GLT actually tackles the subject head on both with the girls encounters with neardemise and repeated inseries acknowledgement that the lackadaisical lifestyle they lead is unsustainable. During the aforementioned Spiral segment Chi compares their lives to the spiral ramp an endless corkscrew that will eventually terminate somehow and somewhere but its hard to know where and when and until then each iteration of the loop is remarkably similar. Not only is this a nod to the series opening which features the kettenkrad driving around a spiral pattern its an acknowledgement that every day of the girls lives is essentially the same while also presenting that spirals eventual end as a sort of guillotine that looms over the whole series. At the same time this combined with the earlier themes of episode 6 as well as Yuunow long established as the wise fool of the duoproclaiming that you cant live if youre afraid to die a notion Chi initially rejects as stupid but rather quickly comes around to seems to advocate pushing forward and living in the moment even in the face of certain eventual demise. Its a theme thats actually pretty powerful and perhaps unintentionally surprisingly relevant to the 21st century. Its legitimately hard to not lapse into episodebyepisode breakdown because these themes are iterated on and reemphasized so many times that its compelling to just list example after example but the main thesis of the series is unchanging. Girls Last Tour then is a story about the twilight years of Earth itself. This comes to a head in the final episode. The girls having stumbled upon a grounded ship somehow still rigged with functioning electricity a nuclear reactor is implied to be responsible accidentally find a way to open the contents of their camera on a multimedia player a thing they are of course not familiar with. We see pictures firstof the man who gave the girls their camera as well as an unnamed woman he was traveling with departed through some fashion by the time he showed up in the series. Then something extraordinary happens Yuu plays every video file on the device at once and a hypercondensed flurry of human history via media flashes by. First we see the meeting of a girls robotics club its three uniformed members and their lazy conversation being a loving riff on more conventional contemporarilyset slice of life anime. Then there are home recordings of a newborn baby a classical concert declarations of war nature documentaries school festivals panicked news reports we see none of these in full but the swelling frission they create really is something. Media is as a rule of thumb rather bad at talking about itself but this scene is a tribute to the astonishing power of shared experience in general and a sort of premature eulogy for all mankind something that the series itself in a way also is. I will not spoil the series final and really very strange twist but it ties in with that idea as well as anything in the series. Chito and Yuuri the last girls on earth go on living for the sake of each other and themselves even in the face of certain eventual demise. There is something really quite admirable about that and something quite admirable about Girls Last Tour the idea that we are all we have that life as we know it on this strange blue marble has come and will one day go but that we must push on for ourselves and each other is a strangely compelling one. For exploring it in such detail GLT deserves commendation.