Goodbye, Lara

The Mermaid Who Remembered Too Much

I keep thinking about the first time Lara bites the straw. Not the act itself—though that’s unsettling enough, her teeth clamping down on plastic like it’s a live minnow—but the way the camera lingers on her face afterward. There’s no dialogue, no grand revelation, just the slow realization dawning in her eyes: This isn’t food. It’s a small moment, easy to miss, but it’s where Goodbye, Lara stakes its claim.

This isn’t a fairy tale about love conquering all. It’s a story about a girl who doesn’t know how to be human, and the quiet violence of learning.

The series, from Studio Kinema Citrus, is a reimagining of The Little Mermaid in the way a dream is a reimagining of a memory—familiar shapes, but warped by time and longing. Lara isn’t the mermaid of Andersen’s tale, not exactly. She’s what happens after the sea foam, after the vanishing, after the 200 years of being nothing but a story told to children.

She wakes up in Lake Biwa, Japan, in 2026, with a body that doesn’t remember how to swim and a heart that remembers too much. The premise could’ve been kitsch, another anime cashing in on the mermaid trend (looking at you, Nagi-Asu). But Goodbye, Lara is something rarer: a fairy tale that treats its magic as trauma.

Director Takushi Koide, a protégé of the legendary Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revue Starlight), has said in interviews that he wanted to translate the original story’s "values" into a modern context. That’s a polite way of saying he wanted to ask: What if the mermaid didn’t get her happy ending? What if she got something messier—a second chance, but one that comes with the weight of all the things she’s already lost?

The series leans hard into this question, and it’s here that the visuals become crucial. The underwater kingdom of Lara’s past is rendered in lush, saturated blues and golds, a place of mythic grandeur. But when she surfaces in modern-day Japan, the palette shifts to something softer, more muted—pastel pinks, watery greens, the kind of colors that look like they’ve been left out in the rain.