While episode 5 of Ahiru no Sora felt like it was crawling along, episode 6, despite being the end of the game and dragging out that final stretch of the game for most the episode, actually felt like it kept moving along. Part of the reason for that was the focus shifted away from just defending Sora to the various other team members and their attempts to contribute, and then Chiaki threw his hat in the ring and it changed the dynamic of the game enough that the final five minutes felt fairly fresh despite being the same game.
With the focus coming back onto the characters though the whole thing became more enjoyable. Sora’s trust in his teammates as well as the resilience they all had not to just call it quite despite being so far down in the score carried the episode along nicely. If we add in Chiaki tossing a bench at the hecklers (rightfully so after they littered on the court leading to Sora getting a light injury that was never mentioned again) then there’s more than enough highlights to keep episode 6 from feeling like the slog episode 5 felt like.
Episode 7 then is a far more logistical situation with the basketball team realising that without an actual adviser or being rostered on to the court, they can’t actually train on the courts. They even address the fact that up until now they have been playing on the court. It might be cheap drama, particularly with the principal’s condition of not getting into any more fights or the team will be disbanded, but in the context of Ahiru no Sora it feels more like a logical issue to face given the team members and not a tacked on bit of drama for the sake of it.
There’s also a lot of backstory about Sora and his mother as Sora’s grandmother gives Madoka a hair cut and fills in the details – except of course the condition that keeps Sora’s mother hospitalised. I love how they never name these mysterious illnesses that keep people sitting up in hospital beds but unable to leave and be with family.
Anyway, this one is clearly still kicking along and while I’m not a massive fan of it due to my own personal tastes, it is functional and seems to be getting better as it goes, or at least the supporting cast are less intolerable as it goes. I could take or leave the basketball at this point and it would be nice to see a little more animation going on during the game but overall it is perfectly watchable and those who like the cast or the sport more are more likely to be enjoying this outright.
They are really stretching this first game out. Like incredibly so. Like I couldn’t believe they hadn’t reached the half-time and I was checking the run time on the episode because I just wanted it to end.
So if they wanted us to emphasise with the players and feeling like they were trapped in a never ending game: Success! If they actually wanted me to feel some kind of hype then they have failed miserably.
It isn’t as though there aren’t some good moments. Seeing Sora getting shut down by a more skilled and experienced defence is both logical and necessary for his growth in the future. Seeing Momoharu continue to support him despite the extreme loss the team is suffering is a semi-nice character moment for him though now that he isn’t being a thug he seems to be utterly devoid of a personality. Then there’s Sora using his mum’s advice to get a shot toward the end of the episode. All good moments.
Surrounded and embedded in a trial of only semi-decent animation, pretty dull characters, and inane dialogue that just keeps going on and on. The spectators here are the worst offenders and really have absolutely nothing interesting to say but we will hear it all episode.
What is worse is the game really hasn’t ended yet. They are prolonging this another week. This isn’t a nail-biter and regardless of whether the characters insist it isn’t over, it really is. They’ve learned that they lack experience and that everyone outside of Sora lacks technique (though I guess they already knew that) and they can now either train and get better or call it quits. Dragging the game out any longer probably isn’t going to change that outcome.
Prior to this point Sora’s enthusiasm has been enough to keep me on board. But here he has too little of it as he has a lot of downtime between being defeated and bringing back his can-do attitude. In the absence of that vibrant personality, the rest of the cast just can’t fill the void and I’m not interested enough in the sport for the ball bouncing around to keep me hooked. Hopefully next week picks up the pace again, or at least gives the cast more to do.
So I was wrong about finding out that Sora’s mum was actually dead however hospitalised mum is still pretty standard. Also, as usually it is unclear what is actually wrong with her or why she is hospitalised. Likewise, a little confusing as to whether the hospital she is in is near or far given Sora says he can’t see her at the moment. Anyway, hopefully we get some more information about that situation but it seems unlikely.
We do get some more backstory of Sora’s mum supporting him and encouraging him to play better to make up for his height. Little Sora is so cute and this was a fairly touching moment. I liked that she didn’t tell him the coach was wrong but put it on him to put in the work if he really wanted to play. It certainly explains his current self who makes no excuses but works hard.
Understandably, the team is not ready for their first match. Not emotionally and not with a full range of skills just yet, however they are taking the court and between Momoharu’s jumping and Sora’s shooting with a bit of support from the others they are managing to keep just ahead (though I’m pretty sure they are about to get slaughtered next episode).
This was probably the best episode so far and that’s most likely because the focus was on basketball. The only real ‘delinquent’ moment was when the spectators from the other school were heckling them before they took the court and otherwise they just kind of trained and played. It is amazing how much more tolerable all the characters are when they aren’t being complete jerks.
Also, the animation seemed to step up much like it did the very first time we saw Sora take the court. It is so fluid as we follow his movements around the court. I don’t even like basketball and I was impressed at his efforts. While this story still seems to be heading on a pretty predictable trajectory it is doing a good enough job and I’m behind the main character at least and starting to not actively dislike the rest of the cast (though probably won’t get fully behind them any time soon outside of wanting them to help Sora out). Hopefully this one continues to find its feet and lives up to its potential.
Two weeks ago I gave my first impressions of this series and while I noted there was potential for it to be enjoyable I also worried because a lot of the characters who were introduced behaved in a manner that more or less made them characters I just wasn’t going to get behind.
…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.
Well here we are in episode 3 and Aniru no Sora is pulling out all the stops to try to convert Momoharu into somehow who we can ‘understand’ and maybe learn to appreciate. But honestly it doesn’t matter how many times this anime now tries to make him look slightly more sympathetic, regardless of how he ended up being the guy who threatened others with throwing their shoes in the sewer, I’m not about to actually connect with him.
I want this on a T-Shirt.
Admittedly, he’s a lot more tolerable now and seeing him get beaten up multiple times in the episode isn’t exactly a bad way to try to gain sympathy for a character, but overall, they’d have been better off introducing him as a more stoic character and one who just didn’t get involved rather than an active antagonist. It would have made this sudden transformation to someone with a bit of hope easier to swallow.
Sora continues to be the hopeless optimist but realistically it is his never say die attitude that carries this anime as well as the hope that maybe for Sora it will pay off (after getting beaten down enough times). While he isn’t a unique character by any means he’s got enough charm on screen to at least make you curious about what is in store for him, outside of running around the court naked – and why was he naked again? The challenge was definitely boxers. Then again, I also noted after episode one that Sora lacked common sense or logic so at least that point remains consistent even if I wish it didn’t.
I think I’m committed to this one at this point. The overall cast hasn’t sold me on the anime and it is pretty formulaic, but there’s something compelling about Sora and honestly while the story is moving through familiar beats, they are familiar for a reason. They just work.
Episode 2 of Ahiru no Sora was pleasantly watchable and reasonably engaging considering I was not expecting much after the first episode. The removal of random and petty fights kind of helped as instead we got a continuation of the show down on the court and then learned a bit about the other characters while Sora shot a lot of baskets. It isn’t amazing but there’s definitely some potential here and if it maintains its current path I’m probably going to enjoy this enough during its run.
They were making a heavy appeal for us to at least understand Momoharu and maybe not think he’s total scum after last week’s effort. I’m going to point out, I still really hate him. If he was someone I knew in real life I would utterly despise him. Still, he does at least have a moment of realisation at the end when he realises the effort he put in before quitting vs the effort Sora is putting in, and still putting in, that at least makes it seem like maybe he’s going to grow as a person. It doesn’t make up for randomly trying to steal someone else’s shoes but at least there’s a chance he won’t remain at rock bottom.
The pacing in this second episode was definitely better as episode one felt like it dragged a bit. Here we moved swiftly between the match to the aftermath to the next day and so on with the show never feeling like we were treading water. I do want to know why Chiaki seems to think ducks can’t fly but that’s probably a question for another episode.
I’m not expecting great things from Ahiru no Sora but I definitely walked away from episode 2 with more confidence that I’ll see this one through. The one thing we probably could have done without was the part about the guy using a pole to try to steal a girl’s bra but clearly the holes in the wall between the two changing rooms is going to be an ongoing issue. Other than that, I found this episode pretty pleasant.
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.
You look so tough eating that wafer.
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.
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.
For those who followed my episodic reviews you will already know it took me awhile to get into this series. The opening episodes, while there were some really pretty animations, didn’t really grab me as we set up a fairly standard team sport anime. We had Haiji, the pushy driver of the group getting the team together with his vision of them running some marathon, and then we had the assortment of motley characters who would ultimately come together as a team. It was all very ordinary and I didn’t really like Haiji as a character, but something kept me watching.
I’m really glad for whatever that something was. Run With The Wind ended up being an extraordinary emotional experience and by the end I was smiling and crying and just wanting to cheer with these boys. It isn’t that this anime broke any new ground or did anything a whole pile of sports anime haven’t done before, it was more the execution of its elements. Giving this anime its two cours to develop these characters and the team and leading us to the race that they had been training for and giving that race the episodes it needed to play out so that we could see how each character had really grown throughout the series really paid off and while it might be just another sports anime, this one really hit me where it needed to.
It is unusual for me but I want to start reviewing this anime by discussing the sound design. I specifically discussed this in my episode 11 review, but really Run With the Wind was a standout anime for how it used sound. Whether it was music or ambient sound the choices were always extremely fitting for the scene and highly effective at conveying the tone or emotion of the moment. It is very rare for me to pay that much attention to the sound but Run With The Wind is one anime where it pays off and while it might be a little heavy handed it is a major contributing factor in explaining why I was so swept away by events in each episode.
Equally, Run With The Wind new when to put its effort into the visuals. While it wasn’t used in every single race, there were several moments throughout the series, particularly when Kakeru was running, that the anime went all out to visually represent the beauty of his running or his connection with the wind. They are scenes that just draw you in and leave you breathless but they aren’t overused or intrusive. It would have been tempting to put such visual effects over each runner or to use it every time Kakeru ran but the restraint shown meant that each instance really stood out and had impact.
For the rest of the visuals, these are adequate with each of the ten boys having an interesting enough character design and the animation being on point. I was impressed by the races where most of the characters still seemed suitably animated even if a little too regular in their movement but there weren’t a huge number of still shots and panning which a lot of anime would have done rather than animating the crowd of runners.
All and all, the production is pretty solid for Run With The Wind and that complements a narrative that is basic but well paced and delivered and characters who each have an arc that works and ties in nicely with the story.
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I’m not going to argue that this story or the characters are revolutionary or something we haven’t seen before. If you watch a lot of sport or club anime you’ve seen everything here before. However it is delivered competently and ultimately the experience is fairly rewarding.
Haiji was perhaps my greatest surprise. Starting as a character archetype I find quite grating, by the end of the series, while I’m still not thrilled at how he enlisted the others, I found him a fairly charming character. His leg of the race was one that really made me smile and I celebrated with him, which is something I wouldn’t have believed early on in the story. It wasn’t that Haiji changed all that much throughout. It was more that the anime took the time to flesh him out and make him feel like a real person. Sure he was pushy at the beginning and they never try to pretend that didn’t happen, but they give him a motive that makes sense and allow even him to second guess his own actions and to consider where he’s really going. It helps to really begin to appreciate what he was trying to do and why by the end.
Equally, Kakeru begins as your fairly standard character archetype. The highly talented runner who has quit due to some trauma from his previous club. He initially clashes with everyone. Haiji because he doesn’t really want to run with the club and with everyone else because of their inexperience with running and their attitude toward it. His character journey is also pretty standard and honestly drawn out too long. While I like where he ended up, I feel they could have resolved some of his arc a bit sooner than they did and that’s probably my main complaint from this series.
However, each character needs to be looked at individually. Where they all start as just background noise and additional numbers for the club, by the end they have each become a character in their own right and one that for whatever reason the audience has become attached to. It is an extraordinary effort that Run With The Wind has taken to give each character sufficient moments that there is a connection formed before the final race and then each character concludes their character arc as they run their leg.
Honestly, if you didn’t give Run With The Wind a go when it was airing, this is an anime that is well worth the time. While it is slow to really get going it is a journey that is rewarding and with great sound and visual design it is an anime that is truly worth watching.
There are very few anime that know exactly how many episodes they need to tell a story. That makes for dry middle stretches, rushed openings, dragged out sequences, non-endings, rushed endings, or series that just kind of limp along until they fall over in the final episode. Run With The Wind has happily ignored that trend and managed to tell a story about a team of ten characters and only in minor parts felt like it was belabouring a point rather than moving along at the needed pace to keep things from getting too dry.
While I’ll look more at the overall pacing and tone of the series in my full series review, a review I am very excited to write, I will just note here that 23 episodes is exactly what this story needed and it used its time wisely. While there were the occasional segments or sub-plots that were either a little stretched out or characters that didn’t quite get the focus they needed, considering the vat cast, this anime managed to accomplish a lot and maintained excellent quality of presentation while it did it.
But none of that reviews this specific episode which gives us everything we’ve come to love from Run With The Wind as well as absolute closure on the boys journey to run in Hakone and what happens next for the team. The final leg of the journey is run by Haiji and it is right that he brings the race to a close for the team given he’s the driving force behind it.
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However, that doesn’t take anything away from Kakeru’s amazing achievement in this episode. As the second last runner of the team he caught up an enormous amount of time and even broke the section record that had literally only just been broken. For Kakeru’s personal journey to find a reason to run and to enjoy running again it was such a great moment.
And great moments were to be found in abundance as we had the team cheering as Haiji finished. Finding out the outcome of the race and were they ended up overall. Seeing the team coming back together and a montage of what they went on with after the race. Seriously, the episode does everything it needs to do before quietly, and beautifully, coming to an end.
There isn’t much more I could have asked for in this final episode and I’m very please to say that I’m glad I gave Run With The Wind a go. I’m not huge on sports anime, a team of ten seemed a little excessive in terms of trying to characterise, and watching characters run seemed less than thrilling as a prospect when this first started. How wrong I was and I am very happily proven wrong.
I was surprised that nearly half of this episode of Run With The Wind ended up being devoted to King and flash backs of King entering the house. Other than his job hunt, King hasn’t had much characterisation within the story and is one of the characters that I didn’t think had a lot to offer.
To a point that is true with little being really revealed. On the other hand, this is kind of a good reflective moment for the audience seeing King accepting his failures and himself while he runs, doing something for the first time really since entering college and doing it with a team of people who are depending on him. it is also a nice calm moment before the sash gets handed over to Kakeru.
Sorry to say to King, but he was a character that was destined to be fairly forgettable out of the group of ten, and it would have been really cruel to have Shindo’s arc and moment directly followed by Kakeru because no matter how great the moment that came before it, Kakeru’s leg of the race was always going to overshadow the bit that came before it. So King played his role well, and that ten minutes didn’t feel dragged or wasted, but it did make the start of Kakeru’s leg even more exciting because of the build up to it. Haiji’s comment on the phone to Kakeru that he was already the best runner was just kind of perfect and to be honest set up some big expectations for the next leg.
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And Run With The Wind delivered. Kakeru running has always been kind of compelling to watch, and I don’t even like running. This is always achieved through some visual gimmicks that have been used just enough that it isn’t bizarre when they start occurring in this race, but not often enough to overpower the fairly realistic tone the anime has gone for in most other elements. I really liked the visual effect where it was like Kakeru shed a layer of ice or snow from around his body.
However, more impressive than Kakeru just running is the improved mental state we find this character in. Finally he’s running for the sheer love of it and has found a team he wants to run with. He wants to push himself to go further and faster. While I’m not convinced there won’t be a hiccup at the start of the next episode, this start to Kakeru’s run was truly impressive and everything you could kind of have asked for given the journey so far.
Run With The Wind remains an incredibly impressive anime in how it has put itself together and how it seems to understand its pacing and characters so well and seems to make the best choices for putting them on display.
So hard to review this episode because the emotional punch of episode 20 obviously wasn’t beaten, nor did the anime try to do so. Run With The Wind hasn’t been big on continuous melodrama beats to keep us watching so after giving us that glorious moment in episode 20, sensibly toned it down but didn’t retreat from building toward the climax of the series.
This episode we had Yuki taking the downhill stretch of the track and I loved his character moment. As the most reluctant (other than Prince) to join the team and the one who fought Haiji hard, to see him tearing down that hill and giving it all he had was a truly amazing thing. What I liked as well was they built in a family moment for him, which tied in neatly with a previous comment he’d made about his relationship with family, but it wasn’t a bit deal or huge drama. It was just there and a moment for the character and something that helps to make all of this feel grounded in reality because all of these characters have other things going on, but they didn’t make a spectacle of it. Anyway, really loved it.
Yuki passes the sash to Hirata (or Nico) who then runs and realises how much he loves running. This is probably the most back story we’ve seen from this character but it ties in beautifully with all the quiet moments we’ve seen previously with him worrying about his size and his weight. Again, not over-dramatised, fit beautifully with what we knew about the character, and gave us just enough to flesh him out and round out his character story as he finally runs his leg.
The sash is passed to King though we don’t get much of this because we hop over to Kakeru who is pretty much declaring he’s going to beat a section record and yet for Kakeru he seems to actually be enjoying running again and friendly competition.
I find it amazing that this anime has managed to build up a team that feels like a team and the camaraderie and all the points that go with teamwork as a theme, but each character has gone on an interesting personal journey. Some of these journey’s have been happening quietly in the background but they’ve been there and as the final stretch shows each character finally running their leg we get closure on each of these personal stories.
It really is a remarkable story and one I’ve thoroughly enjoyed getting caught up in. I’m going to be very sad to see this one leave my watch list at the end of the season.
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