Review of Stars Align

Happy 2021 everyone! I started my year off with this 12-episode anime series about the sport of Soft Tennis, popular in East Asia but virtually unknown elsewhere. I'm not really one for sports series because they tend to follow the exact same structure almost universally, but this one's really interesting because it basically takes the entire team of middle schoolers and peels back the layers to show the quite broken or complicated family lives each one of them has. There are some really mean parents in this show! It covers all sorts of topics like depression, neglect, abuse, poverty, and all that stuff that Japanese dramasoften handle really poorly... and I won't say it did an amazing job here, but it was sometimes so over the top that it sort of worked. Unlike certain other shows I wasn't ever actively put off by it, at least, so it's no Angel Beats or anything.

Much more interesting to me was the fact that the story features, with great care in every case, character types that are often completely ignored in Japanese animation (or animation in general): an overweight character (not maligned in any way), half-Japanese character (which you almost never see in anime), and even a nonbinary character (which you NEVER see in anime). Just representing these types of people in a story that has nothing to do with them... it really, really leaves a positive mark even if it doesn't affect the quality of the show in any way.

And unfortunately it's just a sports anime so it's not exactly anything groundbreaking. And worst off, it leaves on a completely unresolved note; the show was apparently split in half mid-production, with the second season not currently in production. Until that comes out, this thing is too incomplete to feel like a very memorable piece of work. It has a lot to like, but not enough to love to overcome the fact that it's just not finished.