In the MMORPG Cross Reverie, Takuma Sakamoto is so powerful that he is lauded as the “Demon Lord” by other players. One day, he is summoned to a world outside his own, but with the same appearance he had in the game. There, he meets two girls who both proclaim themselves to be his Summoner. They perform an Enslavement Ritual to turn him into their Summon, but that’s when Takuma’s passive ability Magic Reflection activates. Instead, it is the girls who become enslaved. Though Takuma may be the strongest Sorcerer there is, he has no idea how to talk with other people. It is here he makes his choice: to act based on his persona from the game. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: If the MMORPG “Cross Reverie” has an unofficial boss character, it would have to be Takuma. He plays the game at such a high level that he’s known as the “Demon Lord.” As an antisocial shut-in, Takuma doesn’t have the time or the patience for cute young couples who come to challenge him, and he gleefully blows them up. As he’s relishing his latest win, he suddenly finds himself drawn out of his body and awakens in the presence of an elf, Shera, and a girl with cat ears, Rem, both of whom are arguing over which of them were responsible for summoning him and, thus, who will control him. The joke’s on them, however; Takuma’s special in-game item reflects magic, and the girls have actually enslaved themselves to him. This is inconvenient for all, but they have no idea how to reverse the spell and thus are stuck with the arrangement. The three travel to town and have a sit-down with the head mage; it’s in her best interest to break the enslavement spell to have a better chance at protecting Rem. As it turns out, Rem is hiding a powerful secret which could deal a huge blow to all of humanity. Takuma, as his character “Demon Lord Diablo,” vows not to leave Rem’s side and to help her release herself from her predicament.
Most girls waking up without any memory and meeting a serial killer would panic, but not Ray. In fact, far from being her biggest problem, killer Zack might just prove a convenient resource when it comes to finding a way out of the building in which they’re both trapped. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Rachel Gardner wakes up in an unfamiliar hospital room. She vaguely recalls meeting with a psychiatrist to help her talk through her trauma of witnessing a murder, but beyond that she has no idea where she is or why. Things about her surroundings feel unreal and there are strange cryptic words written on the walls. All Rachel wants is to leave the hospital and return to her parents, but it quickly becomes obvious that she’s in some way trapped in this scenario against her will. She takes an elevator to what appears to be a city street, and is quickly face-to-face with a terrifying man with a scythe. It’s all she can do to hide from him and keep quiet until he loses her trail. The problem is that he’s great at sniffing out victims, and comes for her just as she’s escaping back into the elevator. Rachel takes it to the next floor up and there she encounters Danny, the psychiatrist she was seeing prior to this ordeal. He makes a show of looking out for their shared interest, but quickly reveals that he has designs on Rachel’s eyes. He has a false eye, you see, and wants a replacement, and hers remind him of his dead mother’s eyes. Though she makes multiple escape attempts, Danny outsmarts her and she loses her will to keep fighting. Rachel is saved by an unlikely source – the scythe-wielding killer from the previous floor stabs Danny to death and is about to finish Rachel off, when an announcement comes over a loudspeaker. Mr. scythe broke the rules by killing another denizen of the building, and now he and Rachel have the same goal – to escape without losing their lives in the process.
Haruka is a girl who has a complex about how she is very tall, and Kanata is about to give up beach volleyball because she is too short. With Haruka’s height and Kanata’s experience, the two girls form a pair to play beach volleyball in Okinawa. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Because her mother is leaving the country on business, Haruka gets to spend her Summer vacation in beautiful, sunny Okinawa with her grandmother and cousin. She’s absolutely looking forward to it, down to wearing her swimsuit underneath her clothes so she can get into the water as soon as humanly possible when she arrives. At the airport, it takes a while for Haruka to recognize her cousin, Kanata; after puberty hit, Haruka gained a lot of height and Kanata really didn’t. They both feel that the grass is greener in that regard. After taking a dip in the ocean near grandma’s house, Haruka meets a couple of girls her age playing volleyball on the beach. When Kanata arrives to join her it becomes clear that there’s some history between them. A fun pickup volleyball match becomes intense when the relationship between Kanata and Narumi (one of the other girls) starts to reflect some past strain. When Haruka and Kanata suffer an unsurprising loss, Haruka begs for a rematch. Narumi decides to grant one on one condition – Haruka should spend the next week practicing and learning the rules of the game.
High school student Chio Miyamo has adventures commuting to school every day. Chio runs in to problems both big and small, such as construction, a biker gang, a sudden urge to use the bathroom, and more. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Chio Miyamo is a pretty typical girl, with an atypically-obsessive video game habit. Because she was up until all hours playing a video game the night before, she managed to sleep through her alarms and leave her house with barely enough time to get to school. To make matters worse, she encounters some unexpected construction which makes her normal route impossible. It’s then that she decides to take some inspiration directly from her video games and get creative, taking to the rooftops to bypass closed roads (and prying eyes). On a different day Chio happens to meet up with Hosokawa, one of the popular girls from her class. Though she tries to make an escape a couple of times, as it turns out Hosokawa is actually pretty nice and Chio might actually want to be her friend.
Souya Kuroi has dreams of people with superpowers fighting a massive dragon in the sky, but his real life is almost as weird. He’s had amnesia for about two weeks and been taken in by a maid and an anthropomorphic cat. When a UFO in the shape of a stuffed bear approaches Sorimasaka City and other metros around the world, he’s startled to see seven rainbow-sparkling heroes zoom out to confront it – just like in his dream. Even weirder, the maid wants him to leave his shelter to confront these heroes and take the source of their power. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Souya Kuroi is living with amnesia, but seems relatively unaffected by it. Though his family might be dead (maybe?) and he doesn’t really know who he is, he doesn’t have enough of a memory to realize that he should be upset. He was taken in by a maid (“Ginko”) and a giant cat (“Sensei”) after his accident, so he’s got a place to stay and food to eat (though he’d prefer if there were more meat). School is fine, too, though he still has some trouble remembering his class rep’s name, and she seems to be pretty invested in his life so that creates lots of opportunity for embarrassment on his part. One day while Souya is just sitting around in math class, there’s an announcement about a UFO approaching the mainland; it turns out that it’s one of many horrifying bear-shaped aircraft that have appeared all over the planet. The world watches as a troupe of seven “superheroes” arrive out of nowhere to dispatch the “enemy” but Souya is given specific instructions from Ginko to leave the school building and, eventually, fight against those heroes. When he finally confronts one of the seven individuals, he joins with Sensei to become a powerful and strange fighting unit that’s bigger and stronger than either of them. When he obtains a pendant from the defeated “hero,” Souya’s memories begin to come back to him and they suggest some horrifying things.
Hanako Yamadaki encounters the obscure, low-selling 11-member “C-list” idol unit Ongaku Shōjo. Their producer Ikehashi thinks the unit needs a new member. Together, Ongaku Shōjo and Hanako strive for the top of the music world. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Hanako travels to Japan with her family, visions of idols on the brain. She arrives in japan just in time to accidentally wander into a contest to find a new member for a languishing idol group, Ongaku Shoujo. Hanako’s idea of what an idol is differs somewhat from the group of singing and dancing girls she’s just met, but once they put on a performance Hanako quickly falls in love. Hanako seems to have the skills needed to be a great idol, which she proves by copying a complicated dance routine having only seen it once. She’s also very kind and enthusiastic, complimenting the others on their performance skills. The girls and their producer beg her to enter their contest, which she finally does. But for all her good looks and great dance moves, Hanako is missing one very important piece of the idol puzzle – she can’t sing!
The world is a dangerous place for a red blood cell just trying to get her deliveries finished. Fortunately, she’s not alone… she’s got a whole human body’s worth of cells ready to help out. The mysterious white blood cell, the buff and brash killer T cell, the nerdy neuron, even the cute little platelets — everyone’s got to come together if they want to keep you healthy. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: It’s Red Blood Cell’s first day on the job, and like most of her brethren she’s tasked with delivering oxygen and nutrients to the rest of the body. All she has to do is find her way to the lungs and she can finally drop off her cargo. Unfortunately the human body is confusing and full of roads, tunnels, and rooms. It’s also subject to the invasion of hostile bacteria, which Red Cell discovers as she’s trying to make her way through a crowd; a gang of ne’er-do-well pneumococcal bacteria try to make things miserable for everyone by bursting through the ground and threatening the crowd with obliteration. Enter White Blood Cell: he and his group of foot soldiers defend the body against such interlopers, and most of the bacteria are dispatched quickly as expected. But one escapes, and it’s up to White Cell and Red Cell to catch it before it becomes something terrible, like pneumonia or, even worse, meningitis. They manage to track the scourge to the bronchial zone. Just as things look dire for the cells, the body’s automatic defenses bubble the bacterium up and eject it with a rocket-powered sneeze. Having done their duty, Red Cell and White Cell lament the fact that they may never see one-another again. But as part of the same body, there’s always the possibility they could meet again.
Impressions: As I always say, there’s an anime about everything. Cells at Work! occupies a very strange space where its only neighbors are shows like Moyashimon and, well… I honestly can’t think of anything else comparable at the moment. It’s an odd balance of educational entertainment and science humor, bundled up in a form that revels in taking a bland (or at least relatively serious or dry) subject and finding an exciting and funny way to present it. Honestly, the human body is a miraculous thing, full of so many different interconnected systems that hold our guts together, transport our various juices around, and keep our brains from becoming mush. It really should be celebrated in a way that respects how smart, weird, and kick-ass it can be.
I’m very much in awe of how creative this interpretation of our body systems is. Rather than portraying the various organs, ducts, and connective tissues literally, this series draws from the basic information presented within biological science and interprets its pieces as different facets and zones of a giant city. The capillaries are represented by the endless cramped hallways and similar-looking doorways in what appears to be an old bureaucratic government building. The are a power station, humming as air flows through giant fans and ventilation shafts. The bronchial tubes are a Rube-Goldberg style marble run, transporting foreign material out of the body in a playful and dramatic way. Each place has its own personality, and this episode runs through several of them in very quick succession – I hope that future episodes might slow down a bit and give us a taste of these different interconnected parts.
The show’s real claim to fame is its personification of the various cells that exist within human bodies. While some of these are relatively predictable, they’re still entertaining when used to express the ways in which blood, lymphatic, and immune cells behave in the real world. The red blood cells are functional, dutiful workers making deliveries throughout the bloodstream. The white blood cells are focused killers, waiting for the next notification that danger is nearby. The killer T cells are like a special forces combat unit ready to fall into formation and take out hard-to-handle invaders. The platelets are cute little builders, sealing up holes and cuts so the pathways stay intact. Each cell has its job and all the jobs coordinate to create a fine-tuned system.
This message brought to you by helper T cells.
I like how the premise implies that the bodily systems and the different cells don’t just exist harmoniously by some lucky accident; the title Cells at Work suggests a purposeful, task-oriented movement towards a shared goal that can only be reached when everyone is doing their part. It doesn’t surprise me that this microcosm feels more than a little bit like a mirror of society, specifically an idealized Japanese society, where functionality within a group and loyalty to one’s job are important common goals. That said, the uniqueness of each group is integral to the survival of the system, too; without people willing to perform a certain job, the entire body would collapse. It’s almost like diversity is a requirement for success, or each job is equally valuable… what a crazy notion! You can probably tell that I’m a little bit exhausted with the way the world has been lately; there’s lots of rhetoric out there that aims to devalue different people and the different jobs that they do. It’s just nice to watch something that in some ways states the opposite and also manages to be entertaining.
I want to make note of the fact that for how cute and funny it is, this episode has some violence that crops up suddenly. I’m not going to try to speculate much about the process by which cells, bacteria, and such will bleed when stabbed; I think to search for reason in a situation where blood cells can talk and interact with one-another is a doomed quest. But should you be sensitive to violence and bleeding, well, when faced with invading bacteria, white blood cells get the job done, and violently (I mean, even the “real life” version is pretty hard core) and that’s how the show has chosen to represent that.
I really like weird anime, and it looks like this series is going to scratch that itch for me. It’s got a lot of things to like, including cute characters, overblown theatrics, a creative re-imagining of reality along with some good-quality visuals, backgrounds, and animation. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about how your body works, but were bored by biology class, this might be the ticket to enjoying your learning experience.
Pros: The premise is entertaining. I like how the different characters and groups work together. It makes your guts and tubes seem interesting.
Cons: There are some sudden moments of very bloody violence that might catch some people off guard.
Three classmates play simple hand games. One of the girls is good at games, but hates them as she always lost to her older sister and forced to do chores while growing up. Another girl is of American descent, but raised in Japan, and who only pretends to be bad at Japanese. Another girl usually observes their games, and loses to the other girls. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Kasumi hasn’t liked games since she was a little kid; they were just a tool of her older sister to trick her into doing chores. So when class goofballs Olivia (an “American” who was actually raised in Japan) and Hanako (just a generic girl who’s less-than-sharp) start trying to get Kasumi to join in their game time, she wants nothing to do with them. It’s only after Olivia is forced to trade English lessons for insight into Japanese pastimes from Kasumi that the three come up with the idea to start their own club. Within the walls of the “Pastimers Club,” the three unlikely friends spend their afternoons goofing around.
Impressions: Here’s where I’d normally open with a paragraph about how comedy is so subjective that it’s difficult to rate, and anime comedies have the added difficulty of conveying humor through culturally-specific preferences and tropes. The reason that I tend to review comedies by qualifying them this way is because my personal comedic tastes are very peculiar and specific; this tends to manifest itself when I catch wind of “the funniest anime comedy of the season” and it doesn’t even make me crack a smile once I watch it. I’m also not a huge fan of material that’s mean-spirited, whether that’s from tension that occurs between various characters or between a creator and their characters (some creators just seem to want to make characters suffer, and I have issues with that). There are always exceptions, but this is how I tend to be.
Olivia, living a lie.
Occasionally an episode comes along that manages to toe a delicate line with several of my likes, dislikes, and preferences, while being more eye-catching and interesting than anticipated. Asobi Asobase wasn’t originally on my “anticipated anime” list, though I was admittedly curious about it because one of the more frequent comments I started to see other reviewers make about it was that the basic description of the premise didn’t really reflect the tone of the actual show. The impression that I got from the description and the key artwork was that of a fun, light-hearted series about three girls playing games. I expected something low-key and slice-of-life-ish, like so many other anime series about teens in clubs who don’t actually do much of anything beyond bonding with one-another. The actual anime is much funnier and has quite a bit more bite to it than your typical show about cute girls experiencing regular life.
Much of the humor is based on the fact that the characters don’t seem to care much for one-another, and are somehow thrust into the same situation just due to unfortunate chance (or their own poor decisions). Kasumi doesn’t have the patience or the interest to deal with Olivia’s and Hanako’s goofy antics or games, but she’s got terrible grades in English class and decides that Olivia, being “American” and all, is the person to give her pointers. Olivia’s actually grown up in Japan and despite her blonde, blue-eyed looks doesn’t really speak English at all, but because she made the poor decision to start off her first day in class pretending not to know much Japanese and speaking in a goofy accent, she’s got to uphold the lie. Now that Kasumi has bought into Olivia’s deception and also has something that she wants – insight into and the opportunity to play games – she’s stuck suffering for it. Hanako is just a ding-dong who’s along for the ride. Normally watching people suffer isn’t my jam, but when the suffering and hostility is so low-grade it’s almost a bit of a charm point, it turns the corner from being unfortunate to being genuinely worthy of a laugh.
Thumb wars are intense!
I’m a big fan of the facial feature manipulation that happens in this series, and find that it makes a good basis for most of the visual humor that resonated with me. There’s something very refreshing about an anime that lets its girl characters look ugly. Attractive character designs are almost a requirement for anime series nowadays, especially when it comes to the female characters. Shows can be made or broken on how well they deliver on that appeal. It’s disheartening. Much like Kakegurui a few seasons ago, this series sees its characters transform from cute and demure to twisted, sarcastic, and devilish as the mood requires. The effect in this series is more cartoon-y, but coupled with the snide inner monologues of the characters these transformations give the show a unique visual language that helps to supplement the rest of the gags.
I have mostly positive opinions about the series so far, but I think there are a couple of items worth mentioning which bothered me a bit and will likely come across as crass to others. First of all, there’s a greater-than-zero amount of boob-related humor. How the tone strikes you will really depend on how you interpret those jokes in particular; in one scene, one character slaps the other in the face so hard that the shock wave sends the loser’s chest into a ripple. There’s another scene where all three are discussing how a person could grow or acquire a larger chest. There seems to be some weird belief that teenage girls all want to talk about and to critique each-other’s chest sizes. I suppose it could have been true for some people back in high school but I’ve never really felt the need. It comes across as a weird preoccupation of anime and manga authors rather than something based in the truth of girls’ interactions. There’s also a joke sequence that implies that one of the male teachers is a creepy pervert, since he hangs around too long outside the closed door of the classroom (where the girls are dressed in swimsuits, playing in a kiddie pool… it makes sense in context!). I don’t know if this will be a running gag or a one-off in poor taste, but that’s the kind of joke I don’t find funny at all (and I wish the universe would finally forgive me from laughing at it in Azumanga Daioh).
I get the impression that this show is one where your mileage may vary based heavily on your tolerance for people acting both stupid and jerk-ish to one-another. Personally, I suspect I’ll continue to find it entertaining as long as the level of mean behavior doesn’t get out of hand and the show maintains its penchant for funny faces and unique animation. This episode is definitely atypical of other comedy series I’ve seen lately, and that alone is probably worth at least a watch.
Pros: The facial expressions on the characters are comedic on their own. The anime has a strong sense of visual style. It’s actually funny!
Cons: It tends to be a bit mean-spirited. There are the requisite annoying boob jokes and a male teacher implied to be a pervert.
Urashima is an island far from the mainland. The people who live there lead carefree lives. But five years ago, the island’s three great families suffered a series of misfortunes, and succumbed to suspicion. The people of the island cut off all contact with the mainland, and began a slow decline. One day, a young man named Setsuna washes ashore claiming to be a time-traveler and suffering from amnesia. He meets three local girls: Sara, Rinne, and Karen. Their meeting will change the course of the island’s fate. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: One day, a young man washes up on the shore of an island without clothing or a handle on his own memories. He can’t remember who he is or why he’s there, except for the fact that he’s a time traveler who’s traveled to the past for some reason. Urashima island doesn’t take well to interlopers, so the mayor makes a quick show of putting the man on a ship to send him somewhere else. He manages to escape, discovers the mayor’s daughter in her hiding place, and has some broken flashbacks of having met her in some other time or place. Left again to his own devices, he spends a night out on the beach and encounters a girl whose name, Rinne, comes to him without trouble. He then remembers that his name is Setsuna. Both he and Rinne are time travelers (she arrived five years prior), and Rinne invites Setsuna to live with her. Setsuna believes that he’s traveled to Urashima for some purpose, and there are others there who appear to know who he is and want him out of the picture. Is this mystery one that can be solved before Setsuna becomes a victim?
Impressions: Back when I started writing reviews in the mid-to-late 2000’s it felt as though there were a lot of harem romance stories being adapted into anime form. While there were some that I remember just based on how up front they were with their sexism and lewd over-the-top fanservice, there were quite a few more that were mostly-harmless and homogeneous to the untrained eye. The genre hasn’t disappeared, not by a long shot, but it does feel like harem series nowadays almost require some additional defining factor. The monster girl trend has been pretty big recently, as has the male self-insert isekai fantasy harem series. It’s rarer to see something that simply feels like the “typical” anime adaptation of a harem visual novel that I remember being very common in those earlier days.
Setsuna is not shy about his time-travel.
Enter Island, which establishes itself pretty quickly as a back-to-basics harem style series with a sprinkling of sci-fi (or supernatural?) elements to give it a little bit of flavor. The first episode hits all the beats that one would expect, including the introduction of three potential love interests with whom our protagonist might end up . It’s been a while since I’ve seen Amnesia(TM) relied-upon as so blatant a storytelling device, but I have to say that, coupled with Setsuna’s goofy and uncommonly outgoing personality, it made me chuckle a little bit. It feels almost as if the series and its creators are daring us to so much as make a peep complaining about these tropes; considering that the visual novel was released only a few years ago, it seems that its look, feel, and structure were likely very purposeful decisions on the parts of the creative staff.
All of this feels a little quaint and because of that I actually have some generally-positive feelings towards the surface aspects of this episode, but there are a couple of very brief moments that I found somewhat questionable in terms of both taste and implication. In one of the episode’s first scenes, Karen (the mayor’s daughter and one of the assumed love interests), trips on the sandy beach and falls face-first onto Setsuna’s naked groin. It’s played up for comedy, but it’s one of those things that only seems like bawdy slapstick until you really start thinking about the details. I find the thought of getting an accidental face-full of a stranger’s penis to be pretty upsetting, to be honest. As it is with a lot of these types of anime, the humor often seems to be predicated on the characters’ embarrassment, specifically sex-related mortification. Unfortunately, though it’s meant to lighten the mood, it honestly just makes me squirm in my seat. There’s also the hint of a scene that seems to be a flashback (or flash-forward? Time travel is hard!) where a nude Rinne (who’s looking to be especially pre-pubescent) appears to be in a sexual situation with Setsuna. It’s there and gone in a matter of seconds, so it didn’t register with me right away, but the coupling of the young character design with the nudity and atmosphere felt creepy and gross. And of course there are the “small boob” jokes involving the shrine maiden character and the non-consensual near-kiss with Karen. These moments are brief and might be easy to overlook for some, but they’re good reminders of some of the fundamental problems many similar series tend to have in that the women are there for entertainment and primarily at the expense of their dignity.
A fated meeting on the beach.
There was one thing that I absolutely loved about this episode, though: the school uniforms. Goofy school uniform designs tend to be a pet peeve of mine, usually because they’re created for looks rather than practicality or functionality. No one would actually wear something like that unless they were actively cosplaying. The school uniforms in Island, however, are some of the most practical that I’ve ever seen, and that’s because instead of teeny short skirts that seem too short to be worth anything, the bottoms of the uniforms are shorts. This is awesome! It fits the warm island aesthetic very well and avoids the temptation to have constant up-skirt shots peppered throughout the episode. This is one anime trend I that I hope catches on.
This episode is surprisingly watchable, and I’m admittedly just a teensy bit interested in learning about what Setsuna’s deal is, despite the fact that he’s still a little bit of a “nothing” character. I get a weird sense of nostalgia from this opening chapter which is overriding my normal taste-related instincts to drop it and walk away. Perhaps this is just the consequence of being an anime fan for so long; even tropes that you don’t like become familiar echoes of a time when watching anime was a little fresher and writing about it was less restrained.
Pros: Someone put some thought into the uniform designs. The mystery surrounding Setsuna’s situation is mildly intriguing. The show feels nostalgic.
Cons: Each of the three young women is put into a questionable and compromising position, whether in “real life” or in flashback form.
Kentarō Tachibana is the coach of Kitakomachi High School’s badminton team. He is worried because the team has so few members that it cannot even enter competitions, but then he spots a student named Ayano Hanesaki easily climbing a large tree on the school grounds, expertly demonstrating excellent motor skills. Tachibana tries to get Ayano to join the badminton team, but finds out that Ayano hates badminton. – ANN
Episode 1 Summary: Nagisa Aragaki tries her hardest to improve her badminton game and she’s very skillful, but not quite good enough to survive a match with Ayano Hanesaki, someone who seems to have boundless natural talent. After being shut-out against Hanesaki, Nagisa returns to her high school badminton club and begins to take the loss out on others. As people are driven away from the team one-by-one (including the upperclassmen), Nagisa comes to the painful realization that she’s begun to take her own insecurities out on the people around her, blaming them for her inability to achieve the things she wishes to. To add insult to injury, Hanesaki attends the same high school, and the badminton team’s new coach, Kentaro Tachibana (a former olympian), is convinced that Hanesaki is what their team needs to become competitive. But Hanesaki has no interest in playing badminton again, and Nagisa is still struggling with those painful losses.
Impressions: I was looking forward to this series a lot based primarily on some of the preview footage. I like to tell people that there’s an anime out there about anything, and that’s especially true for various sports. Badminton might bring to mind images of garden parties and women in Victorian bustle dresses, but I was impressed by how convincing the trailer was at portraying badminton as an intense sport where players actually expend a great deal of energy. As it turns out, the trailer footage is primarily taken from the opening scenes of this introductory episode, and the expression of Nagisa’s intense concentration and drive to continue a lost battle against the talented Hanesaki through her dripping sweat and tense muscles is powerful and gripping. This scene represents the most intense action in the episode, and it remains a memorable focal point throughout.
Nagisa struggles with her own behavior.
That isn’t to say that the rest of the episode is boring; while the sports action is eye-catching, there’s also a sense of tension that’s cultivated around Nagisa’s emotional journey. I was surprised by how effective this was considering that the characters are brand new at this point and their stories are only portrayed in the most basic of terms. One thing that I found helped contribute to this was Nagisa’s internal narration in the opening scene as she struggled to return each shot and yet failed to win her match. I realized that I felt a lot of sympathy towards her situation – as she asks a couple times throughout the episode, what can you possibly do when you put forth your best effort and it just isn’t good enough? How can you win against someone who has loads of natural talent when it takes you three times as much effort to get to the same level? It’s a question that I’ve asked myself a lot throughout my life, because I’ve had the joy and pain to know a lot of incredibly talented people, many of whom can best me easily in the things that I like to do but don’t have much natural talent for. With the added stress of being called “gifted” at some early point in my life and thinking I was just naturally smart, and then being confronted later on with the fact that I needed to try just as hard as anyone else at things and not having good tools to do so, you can probably guess why this part of the story resonated with me so clearly.
Hanesaki prevents a disaster.
Because the primary conflict, rivalry, and relationship in this series seems to be between two girls, at least judging by the bulk of this episode, I’m feeling a little bit less enthusiastic about the fact that not only is the male coach given a lot of air time in the descriptions I’ve been reading about the show, but he comes across as a perverted jackass from the moment he makes his on screen debut. I’d had the sinking feeling that his presence might take something away from the parts of the story that interested me, and it’s already been the case. In this Larry Nassar-tainted world that we live in, I have very little tolerance for men in positions of authority (in sports and elsewhere) being creepy towards, well, pretty much anyone, but especially teenage girls. It was the reason why I dropped Uma Musume: Pretty Derby like a hot potato almost immediately; the male coach assaulted the female main character multiple times (grabbing her body – specifically her thighs – without her consent) in the first episode and it was played for comedy. A lot of people seemed to brush it off and I gather that the show was a fun watch beyond that, but the imagery still gives me a knot in my stomach. Tachibana’s arrival is heralded by him eyeballing female tennis players from the other side of a fence, and one of the first things he does is to run to Hanesaki and start grabbing at her wrists without any sort of introduction or consent. Again, this is played for comedy, or at least is meant to imply that the coach is so focused on his sports-related goals that his possibly dubious grasp of social norms gets thrown out the window. What it is is gross, and I wish that better decisions had been made at some point along the line (possibly in the original manga, assuming this adaptation is faithful).
Hanesaki is done with badminton.
I’m not against having male authority figures in anime about girls’ sports, but I found that the story was unfolding just fine without that particular contrivance and was really enjoying the episode more when the girls were working through things in their own way, using their own voices. Perhaps I’m just overlooking some really obvious example, but I feel like sports anime starring girls tends to lack some of the seriousness that you get from much of the sports anime starring boys, and this series looks a lot like it could buck that trend. It will just have to get over the inclination towards creeper “comedy” and show a little more confidence in its characterization of the coach.
I’m finding more and more that my strongest negative reactions towards anime are not because a show is just outright terrible, but more because it managed to do so many things well and then managed to biff it in a way that bothers me personally and fundamentally. I certainly don’t think that this show is irredeemable; If subsequent episodes are anything like this one they’ll be both visually interesting and emotionally compelling. I loved the use of color throughout and though the animation was really well done. It got me interested in watching badminton! I would just hope that the coach character is given the chance to behave like a normal human being and that the show lets go of this “young adult males love to creep on teenage girls” thing it’s got going on.
Pros: The action is well-animated. Much of the episode is visually rendered very well. Nagisa’s emotions are portrayed very truthfully in a short amount of time.
Cons: There’s some ill-timed perverted “comedy” that undercuts the tone of the rest of the episode.
Streaming: Crunchyroll
