Man, why the hell did I ever force myself to watch this trainwreck of a show? One of three anime produced by PA Works for the summer 2024 season, Nanare Hananare, or Narenare for short, is a "cute girls doing cute things" anime focused on...cheerleading? We already had an anime about cheerleading, Anima Yell. Remember that show? I only checked out Narenare because it looked cute, but man do I regret it. I'm not going to mince words here, I haven't seen many anime that PA Works have made, but out of the ones I've seen, Narenare is the worst thing they put out. No, I haven't seen what many consider to be their actual worst work, Glasslip, nor do I want to. Why would I want to subject myself to that disaster? And before anyone says anything, no, I don't have anything against the whole "cute girls doing cute things" genre. There are quite a few shows I like that fit into that bill, but many of my favorites tend to have more to offer than just "hurr-durr, look at these cute anime girls." Narenare is a show that claims it has more to offer than just CGDCT, but every attempt it makes to be something meaningful or interesting completely falls flat and is completely, horribly mediocre.
Normally I'd give a summary of what a show is about, but in the case of Narenare, I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to be about, really. It claims to be about a girl, Kanata, who is struggling with something called yips, resulting in her being booted out of her school's cheerleading team, but then she meets a Brazilian girl who browbeats her and other girls into forming a cheerleading group focusing on making videos for her channel. Actually, Narenare as a show can't seem to figure out just what its end goal is supposed to be. To have the girls be their own cheerleading group? To make some sort of viral video? The whole show feels directionless, like nobody on staff has any real idea of what they want the show to be about, and what few plot points it does focus on only come up when the show itself thinks its convenient. Even the cheerleading in this show just feels like it was thrown in just to give the characters something to do, like "We're cheerleaders, and we're gonna go around cheering on random strangers over really stupid stuff to make them happy, even for something as unnecessary as using eyedrops!" Like...I'm pretty sure that's not how cheerleading works. If some group of girls went around butting into people's business with cheerleading, they'd just be seen as annoying rather than endearing. So not only does Narenare not know how cheerleading works, they try to shoehorn it into literally everything, even when it'd be completely pointless to have it be there.
Furthermore, the characters are little more than one-note moe stereotypes with squeaky voices who never evolve past their main archetype, and even when the show TRIES to develop them, every attempt it makes at doing so completely botches any potential they could have utilized with them. Narenare's biggest problem with handling both its story and characters is that it thinks it's doing a good job at getting you to care about them, but not only do its attempts at developing them come off as shallow and surface-level at best, any kind of arc they get winds up getting resolved in the very next episode. And seriously, the show pulls neat and easy resolutions to literally everything from out of its ass, and does this for EVERY. SINGLE. PLOTLINE. Kanata has yips and can't go back to her cheerleading team? That's fixed by her going to a whole new team and abandoning her old one! A shop that Anna has an emotional attachment to is about to be shut down? Let's have everyone perform a cheerleading routine and have Anna be friends with super famous musicians who conveniently stop by and save it at the very last minute, with a dollop of emotional blackmail and stupidity on top! Kanata is lambasted by everyone for going behind their backs doing solo cheer routines and hurts herself? Let's have Megumi, the local walking talking inspiration porn, perform a physically daunting cheer routine in the rain and milk as much sympathy from the audience as possible! There is one segment that TRIES to be more dramatic and not have an easy solution, the aforementioned episode about PomPoms cutting back on cheer routines but Kanata doing solo ones without their permission, but not only do the show's staff ignore the more obvious, helpful solution by having everyone talk things out, what Kanata did in the grand scheme of things isn't even all that bad, but everyone around her acts like she committed a fucking murder, devolving into the kind of insipid, ridiculous melodrama you'd find in Elsie Dinsmore.
But its lack of scaffolding, scattershot narrative, and stereotyped characters aren't Narenare's only problems. Take for example the visuals. The animation by itself is fine, though I really don't like how literally every single character has two-toned hair. However, there is one thing about the show's art style that really bogs it down: Who thought it was a good idea to have colored border lines on literally EVERYTHING? Seriously, this makes what should be a normal, pleasant artstyle akin to Aquatope and Sakura Quest look absolutely gaudy and eye-straining. These are used on not just the backgrounds, but the characters, I mean it when I say this is used throughout the entire show, and unfortunately, it's a feature, not a bug. I don't know if this was a deliberate stylistic choice, but it's one that really doesn't work, because it makes everything look radioactive. Seriously, it says a lot when another show PA Works made in this same season, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, looks way better than this and is easier on the eyes due to having regular black outlines on everything. Oh, and do I even need to mention the bad CGI for the cheerleading performances? I have even less to say about the soundtrack, as it's just your usual bland, squeaky J-pop that I'm pretty sure rips off other OSTs from other shows. Speaking of audio, by God is Kanata's voice annoying as hell, especially when she screams.
I'm not going to waste more of my time on this show. Nanare Hananare is dull, annoying, gaudy, cloying, has absolutely no idea what it wants to do with itself, and is pretty much corporate shill that think it's good when it really isn't. PA Works, I know you can do much better than this. How in the world did you manage to mess up a show like this so badly?! It's so easy to fix this show's many mistakes! If you wanted to do a CGDCT show, this is NOT the way to go about it. Seriously, skip Narenare for all it's worth. There are many shows out there that are just way better than this, like A Place Further Than The Universe, Laid-Back Camp, Do It Yourself, Sakura Quest, Shirobako, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Super Cub, Kanon, Air, Clannad, Bocchi The Rock, Girls Band Cry, and so on! Spare yourself the eye-searing inanity that is Narenare.
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