Review of Hanebado!

It's interesting how much impact a few tweaks to an established formula can make to a story. Based on the early scenes of this badminton series, I assumed the main character would be a typical genki girl whose badminton pro mother suffered the usual case of Protagonist Parental Death Syndrome (Diagnositic Manual of Anime Diseases, 1st ed) before her daughter reached high school. That's not how it goes though. Hanesaki's mother abandoned her, and that's how it starts: the fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good badminton players...cruel. Having disengaged from the sport when she entered high school, her well-meaning friend dragsher back to it, little knowing that the more Hanesaki fixates on badminton, the more her pain and bitterness turn her into a monster.

The other wrinkle Hanebado! adds to the usual formula is which characters it focuses on. The usual pattern in sports anime is that the perspective characters will start off in a slump and claw their way to victory through hard work and guts. While there's an element of that, Hanebado! spends most of its time in the head of the character who loses each match, focusing on what drives them to keep playing even when they have seemingly hit a wall they can't climb.

The art and music deserve special mention. Hanesaki's downward spiral is a visible transformation, first in the dead-eyed stare she develops during matches, and culminating in her looking to have aged a decade in the span of a few months by the climactic match in the final few episodes. The animation for the badminton scenes is outstanding, and remains consistent throughout the series. The story doesn't focus on characters having over-the-top signature moves, instead being a pretty technical depiction of the sport, and it's impressive that the animation manages to maintain a feeling of drama and dynamism despite that. Meanwhile the music often adds an unusually dark feeling behind the action, reflecting the doubts of the characters as much as the intensity of the action.

It all comes together into a good self-contained story arc in its 13 episodes. While sports stories could always carry on forever, it resolves the major conflicts it establishes, so it doesn't feel like there are too many loose ends. By daring to take a less glamorous look at what drives people to push themselves in the face of adversity, Hanebado! stands out from the crowd. I take issue with some of the actions the writer seems to vindicate in the end, but this is still one of the more memorable sports shows of the last decade.