Short guy with height complex
wants to play basketball.
It’s been awhile since I’ve taken on a sports anime. Admittedly I did review Run With The Wind and Tsurune this year but they are both just a little bit different to the standard team dynamics in something like Haikyuu. Ahiru no Sora has made a fairly unimpressive start but it isn’t without merit and there’s certainly a lot of growth potential. Whether it does anything with that or not remains to be seen.
Kurumatani Sora is a new high school student who just wants to play basketball despite being under 150 centimetres tall. Seriously? I’m 165 centimetres and even I realise that’s too short to actually be effective at basketball. But hey, it isn’t as though short and spunky characters with grit and determination haven’t dominated in anime sports series before so I guess we’ll just wave that one right on by and deal with his idiotic decision not to run away from fights. Sure, if you have a chance of winning stick around but why on earth would you stand there and get pummelled? Yep, our protagonist has determined protagonist syndrome all over and that may very well crush my enthusiasm for the Ahiru no Sora if he doesn’t start applying actual logic to the situations he’s in.
When we add the rest of the introduced cast so far which consists mostly of the delinquents who make up the ‘basketball team’ at the highschool Sora is attending and it just makes me sigh. These are the usual knock people down because they can delinquents that appear so often in anime. Worse than that, it is clear from the OP that sooner or later they are actually going to start playing and at that point they are going to want the audience behind these characters but regardless of what development occurs here a character who steals someone else’s shoes is not one I’m going to be cheering for anytime soon.
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It isn’t all doom and gloom. While the character designs aren’t exactly pretty, each of the characters is quite distinct. The scenery so far has been lovely, and the final few minutes where we actually played basketball weren’t bad. I just wish there was some common sense at play. You know, why didn’t the main character know that the school he was going to didn’t have a competitive team? They are probably going to pull the ‘dead mum went to that school’ card as a justification for a choice but given his obsession with playing you would think he would have done a bare minimum of research.
This one may or may not last the season but at least it is changing things up from the fantasy/isekai fare that I’ve been drowning in lately. For the sheer fact that there are so far no super powers of any kind going on I’m going to give this one a go and see if that novelty is enough to keep me watching. Still, the characters so far aren’t helping Ahiru no Sora’s case and unless they start being a little more tolerable this one won’t go far for me.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James
Follow the journey of Ahiru no Sora with all episode reviews.
Images from: Ahiru no Sora. Dir. K Kusakawa. Diomeda. 2019.
I agree. It was an ok first episode that could get better, but nothing ground breaking.
Hopefully it will pick up, but if not I’ll probably drop it.
Same honestly.