Review: Blue Box

  No, this is not a review of that one crazy soccer anime.

Media type: Japanese anime, television show

How many episodes: 25

How many watched before review: 8

Genre: sports anime, slice of life, high school romance

Rating of sport/s in media: 6/10

Rating of show overall: 6/10

Now, before getting to my actual review, let me explain my system here. I am taking a firm stance that decimals in star ratings are for cowards. Yes, I am a little conflicted, but I am sticking with it… for now.

Back to my review.

So, this show is really very boring. This is largely because our main will-they-won’t-they couple are very, very boring both as individuals and as a couple.

Our main character is a badminton player named Taiki Inomata who falls for an older girl on their school’s basketball team named Chinatso Kano. When Cinatso’s parents move away, she moves in with Taiki and his family in order to finish out her high school career with the school’s basketball team. These two crazy kids promise each other to continue working toward their goal of making it to their sport’s national tournament.

In theory, they’re very cute.

They are both a little naive but still driven, and willing to work hard. But their personalities are bland at best and, when not boring, they are, well, a bit cringe.

It is pretty common in anime to have one character move in with the other character to create more tension, to the point this is a trope. But not even teenage hormones unexpectedly under the same roof could make these two anything but a snoozefest.

Pretty much all of their friends and competitors are more interesting. Hina Chono, a childhood friend of Taiki who has a crush on him, is the shining example, but even the minor characters have more going on than our leads.

I went ahead and read the wiki on these series, because I’m just really unwilling to keep at it, and apparently Hina does eventually confess to Taiki. He rejects her, and she goes a little crazy and keeps pushing Taiki to accept her feelings, even kissing Taiki without his consent. This eventually leads to Taiki ending their friendship.

That sucks.

The concept of two kids in different sports who push each other to be better is an interesting take on the often tired sports anime story lines. But we never see any basketball, we see very little rhythmic gymnastics (Hina’s sport of choice) and the badminton we see is decent, but minimal.

Again, this sucks because Taiki’s competitors and teammates are all more interesting than Taiki or his girlfriend.

On top of these shortcomings, the animation is often boring. The colors and line work are really well done, for the most part, and there are some fun choices made with cartoon facial expressions. I chuckled a few times at the surprising facial animation.

But the eyes were weird and the motion was… not amazing.

I could accept the sports aspects being subpar, the romance being boring or even some weird features in the animation, but I couldn’t accept all three.

Maybe there’s more drama later in the series, but if I don’t care about what happens to them next. When I ended episode 8, if you told me in three episodes Chinatso dies and Taiki goes on a revenge spree in Tokyo to avenge her killer, I still wouldn’t keep watching.

I’d be relieved the show got more interesting, for those who did keep watching, but I still would not continue myself.

I don’t really regret the eight episodes I watched, it wasn’t awful while-doing-chores television, but I’m certainly not watching any more.