Summer 2018 Anime Review : Hanebado!

Coincidentally, this anime aired when the hype was on Asian Games 2018 and I was fired up to watch sports! Phantom Thieves may have their own show this season but the one who stole my heart in this season actually not them but this very particular badminton anime. While many people resent how this anime flows (being overly dramatic), I am personally love them just because I could analyze everything in this anime scene by scene or even second by second. Hanebado! proofed that sometimes it is not too bad to change course from how the original material works for the sake of character building.

Let me start with how I could be dragged into this anime. Actually, there are two things that dragged me into this anime. And the first one is that first match between our two main characters, Ayano and Nagisa. This very first scene is beautifully animated with very good camerawork, integrated CGI and 2D animation, SWEATS! and the character tension. This very first match settled the whole series' vibe and set the very first bar to how they will animate the rest of the series. When I thought that they were setting the bar too high, I WAS WRONG. They really kept their animation quality as high as that from the first episode to the end. It is a huge kudos for the animators who have been very passionate from the very beginning to the very end.

The second thing that made me into this anime is Nagisa Aragaki and her character. While I could say that the writer did a very good job  as they did not shy away to make a bad mother character that is Uchika Shindou when the community is full with good mother characters courtesy of Boku no Hero Academia Season 3, I should gave the kudos because of their exceptional job on writing Nagisa as a character. I always love tomboys as they tend to have insecurity conflict. In Nagisa's case, she is overly tall so everyone around her overestimates her and overlooks her hard work. After she lost from Ayano (who still a middle school student at that time), her insecurity came out afloat. Nagisa wants to be acknowledged by her hard work. I love how they made Nagisa's resolution to beat Ayano at the final match is because she wanted to beat herself from the past. You don't know how much I am rooting for her to win.

The other best part is... The writer is successfully made Nagisa as Ayano's mirror but with a very different characteristic. If I analyze a bit further, while being very different, Ayano wants to be acknowledged by her hard work just like Nagisa. But the reason is very different as her (very bad) mother left her because she was not good enough. And not just Ayano, because in the end, this anime heavily gravitates around acknowledgement while building their characters. Just like what the last sentence of this anime said "What you see on the other side of that net is always a reflection of yourself."

And then we enter the sound and music department. I would say that the soundtrack is very fit to the theme of the show as it has this tension around the music and made matches more heated than anything else. The soundtrack is full of determination just like how sports anime should be. I love the opening and the ending songs, too. They are very catchy but sometimes the opening feels out of character as it is too cheerful for the episode and not fit for the high tension and heated episode.

Oh my, did I just overdone this review? Just like I said before, the main reason I love this anime is because I could analyze everything scene by scene or even second by second. I just love an anime that invites me to talk about it or giving a huge room for any discussions because that is a very much proof that the writer did a good job to make us speculate while finishing the whole plot. Kudos for Hanebado! and all its production staffs.

(This review was previously written in MAL : https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=290516)