Review of Ahiru no Sora

Ahiru no Sora is no masterpiece. In fact, it honestly barely even qualifies as good. For a shounen sports anime, it’s distractingly lacking in its visuals, the character designs are rather ugly, and on most technical details it’s unremarkable at best. If any of the above sound like dealbreakers to you, then give this one a pass. If you’re more interested in the journey only a long shounen can offer, however, read on. This show may be exactly what you’re looking for. As an aside, I have not read the manga, this is my anime-only opinion. The show’s strongest aspectis how it nails its premise, one which is unique by shounen standards (though considering the age of the genre I’m probably wrong on that). Kurumatani Sora is a skilled high school basketball player who is hampered by his short height. OK, so maybe it’s not all unique in our world with Haikyuu, but what’s more interesting is that his high school’s basketball team consists of a bunch of hoodlums who don’t actually care about basketball and are only members since the school requires every student to join a sports team. The plot, rather than angling at Sora ejecting the punks and replacing them with different students who want to play basketball, takes the more interesting path as a redemption story.

Watching just how much these kids change from the anime’s beginning to its end is one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had watching an anime in the past year. The transition these punks go through is incredibly seamless and natural. They don’t just become radically different characters between episodes, though of course some episodes create more change than others. I honestly can’t stress enough just how well done these characters’ evolution is, it’s absolutely the handsomest peacock feather in this anime’s cap.

The characters are enjoyable outside of just their development, too. They’re all actually written like people, and as a result I had no trouble remembering all of their names, no mean feat in a genre as saturated as sports. One set of characters I particularly want to draw attention to are, ironically enough, the team’s benchwarmers. Usually benchwarmers in sports shows are a bit on the dull side, even with more critically acclaimed shows like Kuroko no Basket and Haikyuu. But between how there are fewer of them then your average show and the shows’ character focus, the benchwarmers are as memorable as the rest of the cast. While this normally would be something I would point to as a negative, here it’s instead a testament to just how great this cast is.

Also good is all the show’s OPs and EDs. The songs are all enjoyable listens and the openings and endings themselves are very well put together. They’re more memorable than the show itself in some ways. You’d hope the first one, Happy Go Ducky, would be anyway, because that one’s from The Pillows of FL;CL fame. I know right?

Unfortunately, nothing else about the show is anything more than average. Your average episode is standard outside of the overarching story; just normal, sometimes goofy shounen stuff. Animation is adequate, but obviously cheaply made, which is harder to forgive when you’re a sports show and your main drawing point is supposed to be killer action shots. Lined up next to other stuff airing during this show’s run, the characters look rather distractingly ugly. Usually this isn’t something I pay attention to, and even in this case I didn’t particularly mind, but if even I’m noticing it then I can definitely see this being a deal-breaker for some people.
In every episode there’s a scene where a cool basketball scene action, and in every episode I failed to follow where the hell the ball was moving during these scenes. One moment the ball is in basketball man’s hands, the next moment it cuts away to basketball man doing some cool basketball-related technique in a dimension with no background, and then it cuts again to show basketball going into the net. It’s all really silly and tacky, and I don’t think that’s what the show’s staff had in mind as they were making this. It’s enough to communicate the point, but not much else.
Perhaps worse of all for me was that the writing beyond the main story line simply isn’t all that great. The jokes occasionally elicited a chuckle or so out of me, and the side stories could be heartwarming at times, but overall nothing really stood out. And that’s really the show’s biggest problem, nothing stands out, it’s just an average shounen that just so happened to nail its premise to such a degree that I could get through the whole thing. I honestly don’t have any regrets about watching it the whole way through, but it’s hard for me to recommend this to someone unless they’re looking for this particular kind of redemption story.

If you’re looking for a good redemption story with memorable characters and the visual aspect of anime is less important to you, this may just be what you’re looking for. Even if you just can’t get past how bad the show can look at times, I’d say it’s definitely worth checking out the manga at the very least if anything I’ve written here has persuaded you. You won’t regret it.