Final Thoughts – HANEBADO!

A very attractive mess.

There’s no mincing words here – HANEBADO! looks gorgeous in motion. It is perhaps the best-looking show of the season outside of Attack on Titan or Revue Starlight, and while it can look a little wonky in the still shots, the matches are directed impeccably, with very ambitious camera placements forcing the quality animation to keep up, and it absolutely does.

But the story is all over the place, with characters going in very strange directions in the second half, and our protagonist going from a childish prodigy to a sociopath. The in-universe explanation makes sense – she gets it from her mom, who abandoned her for years in order to focus on the sport – but it makes it very, very difficult to root for her and pretty much causes the hero position to shift back to Aragaki by the final match, with Hanesaki’s team trying to snap her out of it and her cruelly brushing them off.

So character-wise, we have an unfortunate mixed bag that makes for a really strange show. The production team certainly tried hard and succeeded greatly, but the changes from the manga caused the story to become questionable, almost nonsensical, with a very inconclusive ending showcasing little growth on the part of the characters.

So, yeah, I’ll give it a 7/10 if only for the visual spectacle, but having few decent characters, I wouldn’t recommend it as much as Harukana Receive or Major 2nd.

Updated Impressions – HANEBADO!

It’s exactly as drama-heavy as the premiere implied it would be.

HANEBADO is technically a sports show, but in this case, the sport in question is mostly a means to an end, that end being really angsty drama. I have no problem with that at all, particularly because a) the drama in question is believable, and b) we still actually see the characters playing a lot of badminton. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Battery the Animation a few years ago, which presented itself as a baseball-themed show but in which baseball was played exactly once in the first five episodes, instead giving us a really limp drama that I dropped after five episodes after the main character was stripped naked by the other boys on his team and practically raped and he just brushed it off and didn’t report it to an adult, not because he didn’t want people to know, but because it was apparently just that meaningless.

The story in HANEBADO is a lot more palatable, and relatable, as the main character’s primary motivations stem from her desire for parental approval – her mother’s pursuit of the sport led her to essentially abandon her daughter to live with her grandparents and move to Europe to raise a prodigy, and while that in particular isn’t terribly relatable, her quest to compete and force her mom to acknowledge her again absolutely is, particularly if, like me, you weren’t the favorite child in your family.

The production is also holding up splendidly, and while the CG-cheating is noticeable in some places, it’s used to good, clever effect here. LIDENFILMS is doing really impressive work here, though occasionally it comes out rough around the edges.

Score so far 8/10

Quick First Impressions – HANEBADO!

Wow. The potency of the melodrama in this single episode has me totally hooked.

I’m always thankful for the summer crop of sports shows, and while I’m kinda stumped about the fact that Haikyu hasn’t gotten a fourth season yet, badminton is already looking like an excellent replacement. The opening sequence is wonderfully tense, gorgeously animated, and absolutely brutal, in a Serena Williams kind of way, and it’s followed by twenty minutes of solid, relatable drama, taking a look at what happens when someone’s thirst for winning has outpaced their talent.

That being said, there were elements here that I really wasn’t a fan of. We have an alumni coach that is just a blatantly stolen character, combining Haikyu’s Ukai with Umamusume’s Trainer, and his first impression is (albeit in a PG way) molesting a teenager. He doesn’t seem to be the absolute worst, but this leads into the other negative, which is the pretty shameless fanservice. While I understand that male-focused shows like Free! tend to have this element as well, it’s usually understandable. Here, though, we get lots of girls with improbably huge busts for being athletes, and skirts so impossibly tight that they’ve somehow ridden up to contour to the girl’s butts. I’m not a fan of acting like clothes work this way (and that includes Food Wars’ Erina apparently having a chef jacket that’s tailored to cling perfectly around her chest), and it just completely conflicts with the mood.

Overall though, this is one I’m really excited for. It’s been too long since I’ve felt the hype this genre brings (while I’m still watching Major 2nd, it took an entire cour to get to the first actual game). Getting hopeful for this one.