Review of Ahiru no Sora

TLDR Review at the bottom. Hopefully, that helped. Thanks for reading this review if you do. Ahiru no Sora truly wanted to be something. Ahiru no Sora had the story, the characters, but with most Shounen anime, high episode count = bad. You know, the Toei Animation disease. The problem with high episode counts is that there is too much room, way too much room. So much room that episodes get drawn out to add suspense for, well, “DON’T MISS OUT ON NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE”. With so much room you would probably expect a magnitude of plot devices here and there to keep the story somewhatentertaining, but instead, anime like so just stick to their ground with overdrawn development and action. It is almost as if the writers understood that there was no conceivable way to make a story out of something so very long to the point where they just gave a middle finger to the story and began writing a product rather than something that can even be considered a decent story. It happens all the time, DBZ, One Piece, Bleach, Black Clover too. They’re all just massive let downs because they decided that it would be best to continue as some over winded product rather than just let up and end the story where it is at. I really don’t think the future for long-running anime is looking too good in terms of pulling the best stories anyone has seen, it is just a curse at this point in which all long-running anime will inevitably fall in the same circle of continuously going through the same thing over and over again with writing slipped conveniently at the right moments to create the illusion of a grand journey. It is a big deception device that people will fall into since it sells well as a product rather than something with the intention of being a true story.

Story - 6:
Pacing. With a count of 50 episodes, do I need to say more? In all fairness though, while the pacing is so bad that you can literally forget what happened the episode right before even during a binge-watch. There is an actual narrative Ahiru no Sora has to show, and that narrative is actually pretty good. It all boils down to the story of the immense training of working towards your dream, via loss, and while this isn’t original, the grand scheme of the story is actually somewhat enjoyable to experience. While the story has a good narrative, the pacing suffers so much that it harms the story way too much. Honestly, one match takes up about 8 episodes, who the hell is gonna remember anything?

Art/Visuals - 5:
Zero effort. You can tell that someone was there at the studio going like: Still shot, add dash effect, opacity = 10%, pan camera. Over and over again. There was little animation half the time that it is not even funny, I genuinely think someone looked at Ahiru no Sora and thought, “Yeah bro, you give us this literal trash, so we are not even going to try anymore”, and when there was it would ironically be used for the most irrelevant parts and less for the basketball matches where people want to see some class tricks happening here and there. I don’t know what the logic is there but someone either couldn’t be bothered, or the studio had the same situation with Sonic The Hedgehog movie where someone looked at the design and thought, “Yeah, this is good”. 3D animation for the ball too, it wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t good either, though, I would rather have the 3D animation kept in place than some “attempted” 2D animation of a literal basketball. I don’t know how Diomedea rolls especially how this is their only work that I have seen, but I am sure that they aren’t as bad as what they have given to the audience of this anime.

Character designs, however, were pretty good, it isn’t something that you see every day which gave it its unique style, however, it isn’t groundbreakingly good either. It has style but lacks power, the power to be successful as a standalone design.

Sound/Audio - 6:
Very basic sounds, used “in the moment” too, though, with 50 episodes to watch from, the OST easily because very easy to remember, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was because the OST was good, there were merely just lots of space to throw in an OST whenever a match was played. The 4 OPs and EDs were pretty good but they were box standard in the realm of shounen anime. Nothing else to add onto that.

With VCs, Yuki Kaji on job with Sora and he did a good job at voicing Sora’s personality. Other characters had a good sense of character through VCs too, in that, this is an anime featuring delinquents. So the aggressive attitudes and voices conveyed that well.

Characters - 7:
The characters are the only thing I respect about the show, unlike the story which had horrible pacing, the characters did have some solid development, whilst it was slow, it still existed, and what made it better was that there was a sense of believable growth to these characters. People don’t just change overnight, and ironically, an incredibly prolonged story made for the best way to prove that statement. Through training, hardships, and dumbass mistakes, these characters went from zero and are still growing to this moment in time. In saying this, however, the only characters who get this kind of development were Sora, Kenji, Momoharu and Kaname (to some extent). That isn’t to say the other characters were just left out because why not, rather, they weren’t focused on much, yeah, there was visible development on them, but in something as long as Ahiru no Sora, you would think that there would be a good 20 mins dedicated for each particular character. Yeah. That doesn’t happen. I really think that the writers forgot half the characters in the show and couldn’t be bothered to do any more work to write them back in.

Enjoyment - 4:
Instead of writing why enjoyment was bad. I will leave you with a (rhetorical) question.
Would you really enjoy what is essentially 3/4 of a show being poorly animated basketball matches, with 4 developing characters and a slow story that gets worked on whenever the writers want to work on it?

Overall - 5.6 (6)

TLDR Review:
Story - 6: Good narrative, but horrible pacing.
Art - 5: Just panned shots with some effects whenever a basketball match plays, otherwise, decent in between
Sound - 6: Very basic OST.
Characters - 7: Actual good characters, but not all of them are developed.
Enjoyment - 4: Too long to enjoy.
Overall - 5.6 (6)

As someone who has never read the manga, I still have every intention to do so but Ahiru no Sora further emphasises that long shounen anime is not good. I know this isn’t battle shounen but these are just becoming products for people in the shounen demographic to just be like: “Yo, I’m gonna start playing basketball now to get as cool as these characters” or “Yo, I’m gonna starting fighting like some that hero so I can get really strong.” And does it work? Yeah. Sometimes I find myself in the position, but that doesn’t excuse that the fact that in anime, there are some genuine stories to be told and I simply cannot place Ahiru no Sora on a level like them as so.