Ahiru no sora

I do not have much to add to what SonGokussj has written, and I even find his review more entertaining than some parts of this sports anime series. The fact that the manga artist came up with all the classic tropes regarding obstacles that a sports team and its main male protagonist could have encountered kind of bothered me at first. Problems with a person’s height in a sport where tallness is definitely an advantage? Check. Mama drama? Check. A bunch of delinquents with hearts of gold? Yeah, that is the team. Romantic relationships? I guess we are going to have to get to those, too... I get it, obstacles are important, and overcoming them through training and sheer determination are essential to a shonen anime series. Yet, is there too much going on here? At the beginning I was enjoying it, and then the first match started, which was really long-winded and I felt it did not have the right dramatic atmosphere at all, my impressions of this show started to go down the drain, my interest waned and the inevitable came – I dropped it at the twentieth episode when at first I thought I would just take a break and then maybe it would draw me back in. The twenty-sixth episode is out and I do not feel the need to go back to Ahiru no Sora, lacking any motivation or mood. I found it a pretty mediocre sports shonen 5/10. (09.04.2020)

If you have watched all the classic sports anime and big hitters, and you have no idea what else to watch, then I could probably cautiously recommend Ahiru no Sora. It is a bit mediocre, and at times even a below average shonen in every sense, that could hardly get anyone excited, and it is about as far away from a basketball classic like Slam Dunk or even that stupid Kuroko’s Basketball as it can be. The story is completely nondescript, which would be forgivable in a shōnen if it could compensate for the story's blandness with excellently written characters. So, here is the biggest problem – in all that parade of mediocrity and insipidness, I could not find a single character that gained my interest and sympathy. With one character, it looked promising at first (Tobi), but even she soon disappeared into the other greyness. The second major problem is the animation. Sports anime has the misfortune of making it very easy to spot any inexperience in the creative team behind it, when it comes to creating action sequences. Ahiru no Sora is the emperor’s new clothes in this regard – the fights here are completely lacking in dynamism, they are basically just a series of more or less static images that are so awfully shot and edited that it is difficult to navigate them, and it is hard to pick out a scene that stuck in my mind. I imagine that if the Production I.G studio had taken over, it could have been at least a 3 star spectacle, but this way Ahiru no Sora reminds of drinking tea after the eighth or ninth infusion. I gave up after 15 episodes, not offended, not pleased. (24.01.2021)