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Considerations
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●This is a spoiler-free review.
●This review covers only the first season on Free!
●80, in my view, means a very good media.
●I've reduced the number of images and gifs so it can stay spoiler-free.
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The Story
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The story is centered around Haru, a boy who, in elementary school, used to swim with his friends and win a lot of competitions. But suddenly, when Haru starts middle school, he quits the swimming club and swimming competitively. Haru is now a second-year high schooler, and his friends from elementary school are trying to create a swimming club and bring Haru back to the pools.
It's difficult for me to write a synopsis for Free! Because there's a lot of drama involving each character, as well as many conflicts and things that you only understand as you progress through the series.
What I can easily say from the story is that it covers way more than the usual sports anime. First, they start looking for prefectures instead of directly aiming for nationals, which leaves a lot of room for personal improvement for each character. They also focus a lot on the mentality and emotions of each character. It's not only focused on the sports aspect.
Another point for the sports aspect is that they cover medleys (a combination of four different swimmers in one race) in addition to individuals. So you get both individual development and team development. Really nice.
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The Animation
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KyoAni outdid themselves with this work. There are a lot of angles when covering the swimming part. They use front, back, top, and bottom views to give you full immersion. They also use depth perspective to give you an impression of speed when showing the frontal part. The swimming is very well animated.
(An example of a fantastic angle)
I know that as soon as you bring Free! into some conversation, people start talking about how they picture muscles and everything and can be even taxed as a girl's sport anime, but in my opinion, that could not be far from the reality. Yes, they portray a lot of muscle scenes and muscular men, but they also emphasize the importance of building your body, having endurance and how a swimmer builds their body, which is valid.
(Example of how muscles are portrait on Free!)
Backgrounds, characters, and everything else are very well animated, and I personally couldn't find anything really bad about it.
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The Characters
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I really like the character aspect of Free!. Every character has their own unique style. As with any sports anime, we have the extroverted, the introverted, the energetic/angry, and so on. I like how they also show the foundation of the core character's mentality by going back and forth between the present and the past. Each character is unique and nicely done.
The main character, Haru, has a really nice development during the season, and it's really nice to watch as he grows.
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Conclusion
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If you're like me, you skip everything and read only the conclusion because you don't want to get spoiled with other themes. So I will try to be brief on this point:
Watch it. Free! They have all the good points that you can expect from a sports anime. Training, competitions, physical and emotional development. Combine that with a really nice soundtrack, animation and character designs, and you've got a really steady show to watch.