The loneliness of being a misunderstood child is unfathomable. I've only read a bit of “Sunny”, and watched “Ping-Pong: The Animation” from the same author. They're some of the greatest pieces of “Life” stories I've ever seen put to ink and brought to audiovisual art-form. It's strange to see a person who can depict, and really depict what a person, a kid, a teenager, or an adult, even an old man, are going through. Every age group, and person has a certain level of wisdom or knowledge we don't, or feel like we lost to time. “Gogo Monster” is about that which we might have, wemight believe in, we can still be in touch with.

A kid, Yuki, is that black sheep of the classroom. The kid nobody wants to deal with, the weird one, strange, incomprehensible. We actually watch the story from his, and a transfer student's, Makoto's, perspective and how their friendship blossoms with the true hardships of trying to understand people at such a young age.

To preface, the story is plenty abstract, but not impossible to understand. Filled with symbolism that ultimately is about Makoto trying to understand Yuki. At the beginning, he stays around him because he knows how to tolerate that which he can't get. Curiosity, interest, or comfort, he finds Yuki to be someone who's not all that odd if you think about it. Nobody is odd, nobody is normal to begin with. Life is filled with diverse personalities, and some kids actually are themselves, and only gravitate towards people who like a person being themselves. They're open to sadness, though. Yuki is that embodiment of putting your true feelings in front of you out of rebellion. Conforming to the world is so complicated to some people who can't understand others.

In that sense, the story isn't just about being misunderstood, but about not wanting to understand, or be understood in a cycle of sadness. All Yuki needed wasn't someone who could literally get everything he's going through clinically. IQ, a kid with a box on his head, breaks Yuki's personality open like a book being opened through the spine. You won't be able to read its contents, you just lay bare the interior with no order, or magnitude. You require someone who's willing to look at your cover and take you in from the synopsis. A love which can only be given by trust, and knowledge of what you might be, not what you are.

We go into Yuki's literal psyche, and how Makoto explores it in a vast, comforting, yet, brutal way. Friendship is about trust, and equally, about opening yourself to be hurt. Why must pain be involved? Because we care, we're hedgehogs seeking warmth, thorns and all. Things will hurt, specially as kids, isn't that truly sad, yet, beautiful? To find friendship in the utmost core of humanity, to find that a kid, regardless of circumstances, is good, and he found another good, albeit, very different kid.

The art captures the abstract, the surreal, the wholesome, but its drawings stay with you. The nice old man who you keep remembering, the kid you used to be friends with, and the others you grew out of. Taiyou Matsumoto can create real life people, in the strangest of places, and understand what makes them tick. What makes them happy, and be able to demonstrate it without them saying it. A face, a panel, you know they're holding it in, and they don't say it, but you know it, they know it, and the other person knows it. A masterpiece of emotional, human writing coming from a simple, even if layered, story about kids and how hard it is to reach out and perhaps be accepted.

9.4/10. I believe the beginning was a bit confusing, but man. This thing is just so good.