Ahiru no Sora
a review by NextUniverse
a review by NextUniverse
(TLDR Review at the bottom. Hopefully, that helped, in advance. Thanks for reading)
(Note: This is a revamp of one of my MAL reviews. If you for some reason have a problem with AL reviews. You can go check out my MAL version instead. I don't recommend it though due to various amounts of writing errors.)
Obligatory Dream moment note:
Ahiru no Sora very much so tried to aim for the skies. Ahiru no Sora had the story, the characters, but with most Shounen anime, high episode count = bad. You know, a problem Toei Animation is keen on not fixing.
The problem with high episode counts is that there is too much room, way too much room. So much room that episodes get drawn out to add suspense for, well, "DON’T MISS OUT ON NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE". With so much room, you would probably expect a magnitude of plot devices here and there to keep the story somewhat entertaining, but instead, anime like so just stick to their ground with overdrawn development and action. It is almost as if the writers understood that there was no conceivable way to make a story out of something so very long to the point where they just gave a middle finger to the story and began writing a product rather than something that can even be considered a decent story. It happens all the time, DBZ, One Piece, Bleach, Black Clover too. They’re all just massive let downs because they decided that it would be best to continue as some over winded product rather than just let up and end the story where it is at. I really don’t think the future for long-running anime is looking too good in terms of pulling the best stories anyone has seen, it is just a curse at this point in which all long-running anime will inevitably fall in the same circle of continuously going through the same thing over and over again with writing slipped conveniently at the right moments to create the illusion of a grand journey. It is a big deception device that people will fall into since it sells well as a product rather than something with the intention of being a true story. I am not saying that all long-running anime are like this. But the majority is, and it is simple to make something look grander than it should be. Ahiru no Sora isn't exactly the longest thing anime has giving, but spanning for something that spanned for a year, I can't exactly say that it is the most exhilarating thing I have seen in my time of watching anime.
Pacing. With a count of 50 episodes, do I need to say more? In all fairness though, while the pacing is so bad that you can literally forget what happened the episode right before even during a binge-watch. There is an actual narrative Ahiru no Sora has to show, and that narrative is actually pretty good. It all boils down to the story of the immense training of working towards your dream, via loss, and while this isn’t original, in the grand scheme of stretching out the story over a long period of time actually makes for a decent way to convey such an idea, it makes for a nice way to participate in the characters' journey the story gives. While the story has a good narrative, the pacing suffers so much that it harms the story way too much. Honestly, one match takes up about 8 episodes, who the hell is gonna remember anything? Over half the story probably has the characters currently playing a match.
The characters are the only thing I respect about the show though, unlike the story which had horrible pacing, the characters did have some solid development, whilst it was slow, it still existed, and what made it better was that there was a sense of believable growth to these characters. People don’t just change overnight, and ironically, an incredibly prolonged story made for the best way to prove that statement. Through training, hardships, and dumbass mistakes, these characters went from zero and are still growing to this moment in time. In saying this, however, the only characters who get this kind of development were Sora, Kenji, Momoharu and Kaname (to some extent). That isn’t to say the other characters were just left out because why not, rather, they weren’t focused on much. Yeah, there was visible development on them, but in something as long as Ahiru no Sora, you would think that there would be a good 20 mins dedicated for each particular character. That doesn’t happen. They barely even get half the episode for themselves. I really think that the writers forgot half the characters in the show and couldn’t be bothered to do any more work to write them back in.
Zero effort. You can tell that someone was there at the studio going like: Still shot, add dash effect, opacity = 10%, pan camera. Over and over again. There was little animation half the time that it is not even funny, I genuinely think someone in the studio looked at Ahiru no Sora and thought, "Yeah bro, you give us this literal trash, so we are not even going to try to animate lmao", and when there was animation, it would ironically be used for the most irrelevant parts and less for the basketball matches where people want to see some class tricks happening here and there. I won't lie though, sometimes the anime does give out some nice animation here and there, but you are either in the early stages of the anime, or you have a lucky one-off moment.
This is one of the few good moments with the visuals:
I don’t know what the logic is there but someone either couldn’t be bothered, or the studio had the same situation with Sonic The Hedgehog movie where someone looked at the 1st design of the movie and thought, "Yeah, this is good". 3D animation for the ball too, it wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t good either, though, I would rather have the 3D animation kept in place than some "attempted" 2D animation of a literal basketball. I don’t know how Diomedea rolls, especially how this is their only work that I have seen, but I am sure that they aren’t as bad as what they have given to the audience of this anime. Character designs, however, were pretty good, it isn’t something that you see every day which gave it its unique style, however, it isn’t groundbreakingly good either. It has style but lacks power, the power to be successful as a standalone design. Part of the reason I don't think Audiovisuals should be a 30/100 was because of character design. It evened the element out with a 70/100 design.
Very basic sounds, used "in the moment" too, though, with 50 episodes to watch from, the OST can be easily memorised, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was because the OST was good. There were merely just lots of space to throw in an OST whenever a match was played. The 4 OPs and EDs were pretty good but they were box standard in the realm of shounen anime. Nothing else to add onto that. With VCs, Yuki Kaji on job with Sora and he did a good job at voicing Sora’s somewhat hyper personality. Other characters had a good sense of character through VCs too, in that, this is an anime featuring delinquents. So the aggressive attitudes and voices conveyed that well.
Instead of writing why enjoyment was bad. I will leave you with a (rhetorical) question.
Would you really enjoy what is essentially 3/4 of a show being poorly animated basketball matches, with 4 developing characters and a slow story that gets worked on whenever the writers want to work on it?
As someone who has never read the manga, I still have every intention to do so, but Ahiru no Sora further emphasises that long shounen anime is not good. Hell, even the author did not like the anime, probably not for the same reasons as me though. I know this isn’t battle shounen but these long-running anime seem to feel like products for people in the shounen demographic to just be like: "Yo, I’m gonna start playing basketball now to get as cool as these characters'' or "Yo, I’m gonna starting fighting like some that hero so I can get really strong." And does it work? Yeah. Sometimes I find myself in the position, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that in anime, there are some genuine stories to be told and I simply cannot place Ahiru no Sora on a level like them as so.
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