Tag: tsurune

Final Thoughts – Tsurune

Not an especially interesting offering from KyoAni.

Their big project this year, Violet Evergarden, makes Tsurune look so pedestrian by comparison that I can’t even put it into words. It’s not bad, the execution is alright, but it’s not memorable at all, and it’s because I’ve seen this show before. A kid who returns to his sport of choice after being absent due to some kind of mental hangup and is faced with a hostile teammate and a coach with a weird way of teaching?

I’m hardly the first person to say that Kyoto Animation themselves have made this show already, and it also got a third season this year (which I haven’t seen yet, for the record). And in a year with a lot of more interesting sports shows (to name a few, Major 2nd, Umamusume, Harukana Receive, hell, fucking Megalobox) I am feeling a lot less forgiving towards this one just phoning in an easy B-.

I’m also not finishing it, a decision I should have made long before it finished airing (three weeks late, I might add, a decision which baffles me). I’m willing to give it a 6/10, but not more of my time when I have other things I need to finish and it’s the very last Fall show on my list.

Premiere Impressions – Tsurune

KyoAni does two very safe shows in a row.

And I don’t really have a problem with that, but the problem with Kyoto Animation is that they have a lane that they stick to, and after a while, you can only sit through so many incredibly well-produced stories about high schoolers before you want them to try something else, you know? (Admittedly, I have been sitting on Violet Evergarden, but my point still stands for their broadcast fare.)

As for Tsurune, there’s ultimately nothing wrong with it, and archery certainly isn’t a sport that gets animated often (if only because it doesn’t tend to involve a lot of action), but I didn’t find too much to really love about this premiere other than the lavish visuals. DIrector Takuya Yamamura has had a direction credit in almost every single KyoAni production in the last decade or so, but this is his first time in charge, and he seems to be banking a lot on his team without really sticking his neck out too far. We have a pretty ordinary setup here about a cute sad boy being dragged into a club he used to be good at against his will, and his apparent drop in skill isn’t much of an interesting twist.

My point here is that in a year with as many strong sports shows as we’ve seen, Tsurune is starting itself off with a disadvantage, and considering how contentious many of this studio’s recent projects have been (see Myriad Colors Phantom World, Hibike Euphonium S2, and even last season’s iteration of Free! from what I hear), I strongly feel that KyoAni is in need of a more interesting project to work with.

That being said, I’m still gonna give this a few episodes before I actually drop it, if only because it was only boring in a meta sense. The characters are fine, the score is beautiful, and I want to see if it can do something interesting.