天下制覇

Why does it seem like half the scenes ended with the kid getting a ball in the jaw?

Impressions:

I’m not sure where to start with this one. There’s just so much to make fun of that this almost felt like a parody… or Guilty Crown… but I don’t think it was. Everyone was calling Shuu "Kakeru." I’m not even sure the director here even understand soccer. When a ball comes rolling up to a character’s feet with another yelling to pass it back to them, the supposedly ace soccer player bends down and picks it up. When Mysterious Masked Soccerman X shows up, yeah, Kakeru’s first thought is "This is ridiculous" but his second is "It’s time for some balls!" Who do they think they’re fooling? I think I was shaking my head in disbelief too much to really let it sink in. Even for a Saturday morning show, aimed to probably get kids to buy more Wheaties and soccer balls, this was incredibly hard to stomach.

So, just to make sure we cover it all… we have Kakeru, a high schooler, putting on puppet shows for the high school soccer team while they watch, completely enraptured. There’s his woman, who… wait for this surprise… is a transfer student AND childhood friend named Nana who used to wear the number 7 (oi)… complete with flashback about it. When people ogle her, it shows a red card (SEE!? WE GET SOCCER! WE ARE SO TOTALLY SOCCER!) and then what I like to refer to as "Lamentful Trombone Riff" plays. "Wah wah waaaaaaaaah." What is this? The Muppet Show? Then while he’s screwing around in a park, a masked soccer player shows up and proceeds to use blur animation and stills to show how awesome a soccer player he is before mysteriously vanishing again. Whoever could Soccerman X be? Then his gruff older brother tells him to stop running away from his talent and join the team which makes him hang his head in shame and go into another flashback to earlier in the episode until he screams, nearly in tears, that he’ll do it. 

Slick execution is how you get to use bad cliches without them being obtrusive like that. This was anything but. The production’s just awful. Better than New Prince of Tennis, sure, but I’ve drawn flipbook animations in the corner of textbooks that are better animated than that. It doesn’t even make it to the 9 minute mark before it recycles clips from earlier in the episode, just in case you forgot what happened five minutes ago. It’s hard to even tell if they’re actually playing soccer or what though. It loves to use the "we only drew 10 frames for these 5 seconds, so let’s just slow-blur between them" approach to directing. If you removed the ball, most of the ‘soccer’ scenes could be mistaken for a male-male lambada.

So, yeah. Color me unimpressed. You can practically check off the sports show cliches they went through and it’s certainly not funny enough nor are the characters strong enough otherwise to be able to hide them.

Preview:

Blurs and balls.