Summer 2018 First Impressions – Hanebado!

Kentarō Tachibana is the coach of Kitakomachi High School’s badminton team. He is worried because the team has so few members that it cannot even enter competitions, but then he spots a student named Ayano Hanesaki easily climbing a large tree on the school grounds, expertly demonstrating excellent motor skills. Tachibana tries to get Ayano to join the badminton team, but finds out that Ayano hates badminton. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode 1 Summary: Nagisa Aragaki tries her hardest to improve her badminton game and she’s very skillful, but not quite good enough to survive a match with Ayano Hanesaki, someone who seems to have boundless natural talent. After being shut-out against Hanesaki, Nagisa returns to her high school badminton club and begins to take the loss out on others. As people are driven away from the team one-by-one (including the upperclassmen), Nagisa comes to the painful realization that she’s begun to take her own insecurities out on the people around her, blaming them for her inability to achieve the things she wishes to. To add insult to injury, Hanesaki attends the same high school, and the badminton team’s new coach, Kentaro Tachibana (a former olympian), is convinced that Hanesaki is what their team needs to become competitive. But Hanesaki has no interest in playing badminton again, and Nagisa is still struggling with those painful losses.

Impressions: I was looking forward to this series a lot based primarily on some of the preview footage. I like to tell people that there’s an anime out there about anything, and that’s especially true for various sports. Badminton might bring to mind images of garden parties and women in Victorian bustle dresses, but I was impressed by how convincing the trailer was at portraying badminton as an intense sport where players actually expend a great deal of energy. As it turns out, the trailer footage is primarily taken from the opening scenes of this introductory episode, and the expression of Nagisa’s intense concentration and drive to continue a lost battle against the talented Hanesaki through her dripping sweat and tense muscles is powerful and gripping. This scene represents the most intense action in the episode, and it remains a memorable focal point throughout.

That isn’t to say that the rest of the episode is boring; while the sports action is eye-catching, there’s also a sense of tension that’s cultivated around Nagisa’s emotional journey. I was surprised by how effective this was considering that the characters are brand new at this point and their stories are only portrayed in the most basic of terms. One thing that I found helped contribute to this was Nagisa’s internal narration in the opening scene as she struggled to return each shot and yet failed to win her match. I realized that I felt a lot of sympathy towards her situation – as she asks a couple times throughout the episode, what can you possibly do when you put forth your best effort and it just isn’t good enough? How can you win against someone who has loads of natural talent when it takes you three times as much effort to get to the same level? It’s a question that I’ve asked myself a lot throughout my life, because I’ve had the joy and pain to know a lot of incredibly talented people, many of whom can best me easily in the things that I like to do but don’t have much natural talent for. With the added stress of being called “gifted” at some early point in my life and thinking I was just naturally smart, and then being confronted later on with the fact that I needed to try just as hard as anyone else at things and not having good tools to do so, you can probably guess why this part of the story resonated with me so clearly.

Because the primary conflict, rivalry, and relationship in this series seems to be between two girls, at least judging by the bulk of this episode, I’m feeling a little bit less enthusiastic about the fact that not only is the male coach given a lot of air time in the descriptions I’ve been reading about the show, but he comes across as a perverted jackass from the moment he makes his on screen debut. I’d had the sinking feeling that his presence might take something away from the parts of the story that interested me, and it’s already been the case. In this Larry Nassar-tainted world that we live in, I have very little tolerance for men in positions of authority (in sports and elsewhere) being creepy towards, well, pretty much anyone, but especially teenage girls. It was the reason why I dropped Uma Musume: Pretty Derby like a hot potato almost immediately; the male coach assaulted the female main character multiple times (grabbing her body – specifically her thighs – without her consent) in the first episode and it was played for comedy. A lot of people seemed to brush it off and I gather that the show was a fun watch beyond that, but the imagery still gives me a knot in my stomach. Tachibana’s arrival is heralded by him eyeballing female tennis players from the other side of a fence, and one of the first things he does is to run to Hanesaki and start grabbing at her wrists without any sort of introduction or consent. Again, this is played for comedy, or at least is meant to imply that the coach is so focused on his sports-related goals that his possibly dubious grasp of social norms gets thrown out the window. What it is is gross, and I wish that better decisions had been made at some point along the line (possibly in the original manga, assuming this adaptation is faithful).

I’m not against having male authority figures in anime about girls’ sports, but I found that the story was unfolding just fine without that particular contrivance and was really enjoying the episode more when the girls were working through things in their own way, using their own voices. Perhaps I’m just overlooking some really obvious example, but I feel like sports anime starring girls tends to lack some of the seriousness that you get from much of the sports anime starring boys, and this series looks a lot like it could buck that trend. It will just have to get over the inclination towards creeper “comedy” and show a little more confidence in its characterization of the coach.

I’m finding more and more that my strongest negative reactions towards anime are not because a show is just outright terrible, but more because it managed to do so many things well and then managed to biff it in a way that bothers me personally and fundamentally. I certainly don’t think that this show is irredeemable; If subsequent episodes are anything like this one they’ll be both visually interesting and emotionally compelling. I loved the use of color throughout and though the animation was really well done. It got me interested in watching badminton! I would just hope that the coach character is given the chance to behave like a normal human being and that the show lets go of this “young adult males love to creep on teenage girls” thing it’s got going on.

Pros: The action is well-animated. Much of the episode is visually rendered very well. Nagisa’s emotions are portrayed very truthfully in a short amount of time.

Cons: There’s some ill-timed perverted “comedy” that undercuts the tone of the rest of the episode.

Grade: C+