Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Narenare -Cheer for you!-
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Luna Amatista
Posts: 6 |
|
|||||
Whoops. I haven't used HTML in approximately two centuries so I copied my titles to be lazy and forgot to replace that. Thanks for the heads up! But to this...
Yeah, there are many issues I don't have with the series, compared to everyone else, but it appears to me that a lot could've been solved by simply having the girl from the beginning have a design that is distinct enough from Megumi's to not create this odd confusion. In the group of five people I've been talking about this with -- all fans of It's MyGO, so really enthusiastic about this show because of the shared staff -- I think only one of us was not confused at first. It's made even harder by the colored outlines already priming you for a super stylized show, so I also thought it was Megumi with a different type of color saturation at first. Preferrably, she should've been a named character too, but a design change would've done most of the legwork. You can actually see her briefly near the end of episode 2 - she walks into the locker room as the other girls hype up Kanata about doing the tryouts after all (in the scene after she's succeeded doing a flip in the gym, and before she fails to replicate that for the tryouts). Here it's clear that her hair is very distinctly red compared to most of all the other pastel colors, but hilariously, even here she doesn't speak at all.
This has not been explained yet. From the brief throwaway line along the lines of "Thank you for doing this for me" that Megumi tells Shion, it would appear that she's in charge of taking her back home from PT, but how this arrangement came about has not been discussed on screen. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Eilavel
Posts: 136 |
|
|||||
|
I actually like the rapidly moving, interweaved plot threads. Its feels both more realistic and dynamic; it adds interest to a show thats running the fairly well trod "group of girls with drama and a shared interest" and I prefer it to the "every week is someones special episode" approach.
On the other hand, the ensemble isn't my favorite. Nobody has really stood out as especially interesting, and Anna and Suzuha have been pretty annoying. Still, I like the approach its taking and its not a loaded season so I'm going to stick with it. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Florete
Posts: 385 |
|
|||||
I fail to see what's so confusing about there clearly being multiple people who had trouble following every detail. For the record, I've quite liked the show so far, despite said details being a bit unclear. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
John the Dark Lord
Posts: 266 |
|
|||||
Anna looks the way she does so her character model can have the same color scheme as the Brazilian flag. It's actually pretty obvious if you compare: Her clothes are green and yellow, and her eyes are blue. If nothing else, it's a creative way to pay homage to a country. |
||||||
|
||||||
CrowLia
 Posts: 5530 Location: Mexico |
|
|||||
|
I don't think Jairus has to apologize for the misunderstanding, even from the posts in this forum it's clear basically everyone got the same impression about Megumi and the other ponytail girl being the same character. It's part of the show's direction/editing flaws that failed to convey the story properly in my opinion.
I also agree with Jairus on the ending of the episode cheapening the more nuanced treatment of Kanata's yips they'd started with, and I also hope it won't be a magical cure but something she'll have to keep working towards. Last season's Oblivion Battery, which I think not many people watched, had in my opinion a better and more realistic approach to the subject and also was more successful in portraying the character's feeling of panic in a much lower stake situation (throwing a baseball) compared to Kanata's where even her life could be at stake, yet I don't think the show gets us deep enough into her psyche to empathize with how terrifying that can be. I think the secrecy about Kanata's accident -what exactly happened and why- makes it somewhat harder to connect to her trauma, and it's not clear to me why at this point in time the show still treats it like a plot twist to be revealed later. Are we gonna find out her teammates dropped her on purpose? (/j) I did like the Suzuha and Shion portion of the episode, and answers my question as to why Suzuha would want to join their squad when we'd previously seen her very (rightfully) hostile towards others who filmed her for clout. I also liked the part about them making their pom poms. It had never occurred to me what a tiring menial task that could be and that's the kind of minutiae that I like learning about in sports anime. Looking forward to next week's Anna focused episode which hopefully will give her a bit more depth and also give her friend *anything* because through this episode every time that girl popped up I was momentarily confused about who she was, I'd completely forgotten she existed.
Sorry but if that's true then that's another character design failure. Her design not once made me think of th Brazilian flag, and the reference is not at all obvious. The blue in her eyes is way too light and the green undertones of her hair too pastel, and they don't contrast enough with the bright yellow. As a first impression, she reads as a stereotypical American/European exchange student in any other high school anime, including the hyperactive and overly-touchy personality clichés. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
texnixmir
Posts: 6 |
|
|||||
|
One maybe interesting bit of context maybe is that this show is going to overlap with the Summer Olympics, where Simone Biles is again going to be representing the US for women's gymnastics; at the last Olympics in Tokyo, Biles withdrew partway through the competition because of the yips, which made it unsafe for her to continue competing. I don't know whether that was something the showrunners had in mind, but I do think that the context that like, the yips aren't necessarily injury related, sometimes it's just something that happens, even to pro athletes. I also agree that like, if Kanata is totally over it after this episode that's not ideal, in terms of representation; but conversely I think it's really cool that she's like talking to a sports psych. I think to me that does kind of move the representation of this from like "poor little baby overcomes the yips with the power of friendship," to like "the yips are a real medical condition that need to be treated seriously, even if we don't 100% understand them"
The *other* think I think is interesting to talk about is how this contrasts (at least thus far) with the idol anime genre, which a couple reviewers brought up in the preview guide. I think this does have a lot of similarities with "normal" idol anime - the synced 3D animated performances, the rag-tag group of girls getting together for a shared interest. The difference is that they don't really have like a single shared goal (rather than like "go to Nationals" or "perform at the Budokan") and they are just focused on like being friends and supporting each other. I think that's an interesting way to reexamine the themes of the idol anime genre. Of course, I could still be completely wrong and they could try to worm their way into cheer nationals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But thus far it doesn't seem like it |
||||||
|
||||||
darkchibi07
 Posts: 5518 |
|
|||||
Well, it sort of happened! 
I, for one, did not expect Suzuha and Shion go all Lizzie McGuire when dealing with what's going in their minds during all those scenes in the 1st 2 episodes. While it may seem jarring, it REALLY helped those characters far more to work with especially with their relationship with each other. I do wonder if we're going to see more of that gimmick in future episodes. As for Kanata, I do appreciate they actually delve into why she's having those problems and actually talking to a sports psychiatrist, but yeah the resolution seemed rather pat where it should have been gradual throughout the series. Regardless, this episode felt stronger than the first two, and I suspect it's because of Yuniko Ayano writing this episode since she seems to have a better grasp for these characters. |
||||||
|
||||||
Piglet the Grate
 Posts: 797 Location: North America |
|
|||||
|
The English they are speaking at Stout Records sounds like students in the first semester of an ESL class. But then maybe most Japanese people (aka the primary audience) do not really notice?
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
FanGamer24
Posts: 99 |
|
|||||
Probably not, my dad always mentions when a character butchers German but I sure as heck wouldn't be able to tell. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Piglet the Grate
Posts: 797 Location: North America |
|
|||||
It was not the pronunciation or accent that bothered me, but rather the flat monotone delivery of the English words. Wonder if AI could do better? |
||||||
|
||||||
|
FanGamer24
Posts: 99 |
|
|||||
I can barely gauge the performance of Japane VAs, I gurantee if they spoke some other language I'd have difficulty gauging the quality of the delivery. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Eilavel
Posts: 136 |
|
|||||
|
I thought I didn't really want to spend a whole episode with Anna. My mind was only changed somewhat.
she's probably the character most in need of fleshing out, precisely because she's so in your face. What we get feels kind of so-so. OTOH, especially as she's just a kid, I understand her feelings here. But this record shop is not her story, and it closing is neither her choice nor a narrative thats about her. I would hope we get a narrative about learning to process your feelings. I fear we get cheer saves the record shop, implausibly, and so everything is fine. Is the show about cheer? Is it about a youtube channel? Is it about a group, or is it slice of life vignettes about individuals who are sort of in a group? Its all verging on rudderless after the opening. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
CrowLia
Posts: 5530 Location: Mexico |
|
|||||
This is the other thing that doesn't click for me yet. It's not clear to me why Anna decided she wanted to do cheer, or why Suzuha and Shion agreed to it. Something I tend to like about sports anime is seeing characters fall in love with their sport, and it's often that we see scenes conveying such in the first episodes. I specially think of Backflip which had such a great opening scene of the main character seeing another team's rhythmic gymnastics routine. The opening scene of episode 1 in Narenare reminded me of that show -also because both used a mix of 3D and 2D animation very effectively to create good looking animations for these hard to animate performance sports-. It's also common to see the secondary characters join the team/club and being introduced to the sport and falling in love with it in different ways. But here I don't really understand why they decided Cheer was the thing to do to make Anna's channel popular. Unless I missed anything, Anna doesn't do cheer at her school or anything like that. And since she's already interested in doing it, I think using cheer to save the record shop won't really feel like a satisfying narrative for getting her into cheer. I guess we'll see next week if Kanata will be flying like her yips are magically cured of if the writers are sensible enough to let that storyline take its time. |
||||||
|
||||||
Yuvelir
 Posts: 1629 |
|
|||||
|
Seeing Nodoka's voice being a whole octave lower in the mornings was an unexpected bit of hilarity.
|
||||||
|
||||||
YackDe
 Posts: 200 |
|
|||||
|
The English these last two episodes feels even odder considering that P.A. Works got what seemed like a much more fluent speaker for a scene in Mayonaka Punch that lasted roughly 10 seconds.
But yeah, as expected Kanata basically just got over her yips and we've moved on because it's no longer what could generously be called her arc of the show. Time for a hotsprings episode instead! Between that and the ridiculousness of this one tiny store being frequented by world famous artists and multi-Grammy winners, there keep being more cracks in Kakimoto's scripting. |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group