
He’s a smallish boy with biggish hair and a nervous stomach, and the most inquisitive of the bunch. This strikes Aoi as rather unfair, and he shocks all concerned by mouthing off to Fukuda (who clearly loved it, and is prompted to a much more inspiring if no less sobering speech).Īmong Aoi’s fellow aspirants, most prominent thus far is Ootomo Eisaku ( Tachibana Tatsumaru). This is a brutally competitive process – most of the new players will be promotes from the junior team or studs scouted and recruited by the staff. After a round of gruff welcomes from the coaching staff, including Date Nozomi ( Yasumoto Hiromi – you know this is an elite program with both Sugimoto and Hoozuki coaching) Fukuda-san gives a perfunctory address, in which he tells the boys it’s entirely possible none of them will make the cut. To say Aoi is a wide-eyed innocent here is an understatement – just playing on grass is a wonder for him. She recognizes him, having been told to look out for the Ehime boy with “hair like (Colombian star Carlos) Valdarrama”. The first person Aoi bumps into (literally) is a young girl his own age, Hana ( Kawase Maki). Certainly less than the other 85 kids on-hand to try and claim a precious spot in the Esperion youth system. As befits his unusual route to the Tokyo Esperion tryouts, he knows nothing to speak of about how all this works. But who the hell knows in anime 2022? There’s not a lot else that could realistically go wrong, and this medium has proved itself awfully adept at shooting itself in the foot.Įpisode 2 finds Aoi wide-eyed at Tokyo Station, as many youngsters from the sticks surely are on their first visit to the metropolis. Especially when the committee got Production I.G., which is hardly the low-budget choice. We aren’t getting anything close to all those chapters obviously, but one would like to think that an NHK sports series wouldn’t be one cour. I’m starting to get quite stressed by the lack of news on an episode count. Most of the recent volume has come from originals, and more than any other genre this one seems at its best when adapted from manga, but we get relatively few complete adaptations even when the manga are finished.Īo Ashi isn’t finished of course, though the manga has something like 300 chapters. Especially in recent years sports anime have gotten pretty dumbed down, creatively diluted and drained of ambition by the production committee system. But while there are even more series in this genre, it’s surprising how few really great ones there are.

Like the supernatural thriller, sports is an obvious like-a-glove fit for anime. A lot of what I said about Summertime Render can apply to Ao Ashi too (oddly enough).
