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Forum - View topicREVIEW: Taisho Baseball Girls DVD
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Pandadice
 Posts: 182 |
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A B? really? ... Really? I'll be the first to admit it isn't particularly my cup of tea, but to give this show a B? You guys getting a cut from the dvd sales or something? come on now... Guess I can stop paying attention to Theron Martin's reviews...
Might as well throw in my own two cents on the title. It isn't worth the time. I mean, if you're like a 13 year old girl with an interest in sports, or a person with an interesting in might-be-lesbian implications and themes, then you might get sometime out of it. But honestly, don't bother. It's not good as a sports show, not good as a yuri show, not good as a romance, not even particularly good as a cute-girls show. Seriously, don't waste the time. |
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Thallium
 Posts: 40 Location: Netherlands |
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Being a 30 year old male who likes sports and having no particular interest in might-be lesbian implications, i still liked this show.
I reckon the setting in that era is not used all that often, and a dose of sport mixed in what is basically a cute show worked well for me. It's no masterpiece by any means, but then again a B doesn't imply that anyway. |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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Eh? I thought Taisho Baseball Girls was a pretty solid title. For one thing it depicts an era that isn't really shown that often in anime (the Taisho era or more closely the 1920s). It also tackles something that isn't often tackled in anime, that of gender equality and the fight that women have to simply be respected enough that they're allowed to make their own decisions. I'd say a B isn't too far off in that regard. It's not going to blow you away, but it's something unique, and I think most people could enjoy it. |
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pachy_boy
Posts: 1341 |
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I'd say a 'B' is just about right!
My only nitpick beef: I also noticed how much older the boys look than the girls, and wonder if that may have been intentional moeification, which I'm not normally a fan of. I’d describe this series best as a Taisho-era version of Princess Nine at half the length, while it’s still its own enjoyable series with feminist themes and about a group of girls fighting to prove themselves against the people that doubt them in a conservative culture. spoiler[However, like Princess Nine, while one is definitely rooting for the girls and it feels like maybe they have a chance at the ultimate victory, in the end maybe it should come to no surprise they ultimately lose. I can’t help but wonder—while audiences seem to enjoy watching girls rise up against the odds, would there have been hell to pay if they actually won against the men?] I love it when Section23 cranks out sweet-surprise kind of titles, and this is definitely one of them. Last edited by pachy_boy on Thu Dec 09, 2010 7:50 am; edited 1 time in total |
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albanian
 Posts: 133 Location: UK |
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I would have said that a B was pretty much spot on, too. The show isn't a masterpiece, but then it doesn't pretend to be. It's simply an honest and entertaining work which sets out to bring a smile to your face and succeeds quite acceptably in doing just that. The fact that it has just enough subtlety to make a few broad points of social commentary is enough to lift it out of the bland and ordinary and give it its edge - and that is rare enough these days to warrant attention.
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here-and-faraway
 Posts: 1529 Location: Sunny California |
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I don't follow any real sports, but I'm usually very impressed with the sports anime titles out there: Fighting Spirit, Ookiku Furibatte, Cross Game, Slam Dunk, etc. It's a shame these titles don't do well in the states. Hopefully Sentai has some luck with this one.
And I doubt it will happen, especially since most of the characters are boys and not uber-cute girls, but it would be fantastic if Sentai could pick up the second season of Ookiku Furibatte too. Yes, I know it was a flop for Funi, but then Sentai picked up Hell Girl didn't they? Last edited by here-and-faraway on Thu Dec 09, 2010 6:18 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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vashfanatic
 Posts: 3495 Location: Back stateside |
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Beyond my usual "the grading system is broken, just read the reviews," for Theron a B is about what a C is to most of the other reviewers, it means "decent, though not great." It's because the grading scale has no rubric and varies from reviewer to reviewer that you really need to just read the review. I might check out the first episode of this for the historic interest, but I don't know if it sounds like something I'd watch, even for the "they might be lesbians" angle (although it's far more likely an example of... ugh, I cannot find the article that someone linked to me, but girl-girl romances were acceptable at the time so long as they segued into adult heterosexual marriages). |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2700 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Well Taisho is the second sports anime Sentai has done, with Eyeshield 21 being the first (and it's a great show as well), so there might be a chance that Eyeshield did well enough to prompt Sentai to license a second sports anime, that being Taisho, and Eyeshield's cast is mostly boys so there's no reason to put that against Big Windup!... Hopefully sports anime can at least do well enough sub-only (Sentai's the only company trying this out, too) to warrant licensing more of them. Big Windup! Season 2 would be really cool, but I'm still hoping heavily for Ring ni Kakero 1. |
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Takeyo
 Posts: 736 |
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Given the relative originality of the title being a) a period piece and b) having the girls actually focus on the activity rather than just sit around being cute like a certain other club series, I'd personally be inclined to bump that grade to a B+.
I'm still surprised, if happy, that Sentai picked this up. I was pleased with the release (it even looked pretty good on my HDTV). The translator seemed to know her (IIRC) stuff, and even included elongated vowels ("Koume" rather than "Kome" or "Kohme") and honorifics in the subs (with a couple reasonable exceptions). I did have a couple of nitpicks: * The creditless OP and ED was used for each episode. No Japanese credits, no English credits (Sentai did its standard black screen scroll at the end of each episode). I'm not sure if this was intentional or if Sentai just didn't receive the actual OP/ED for the series. * TL notes are good, but on-screen text was captioned every time it appeared. After the sixth or seventh time the name of the school was plastered on the screen during an exterior shot, I got a bit annoyed. Someone even went so far as to translate the caption of the film reel the girls are watching during the (again, creditless) opening, which seemed completely unnecessary. * Finally, a couple of modern expressions slipped by the editor. There was one or two instances of elementary school boys saying, "dude," and I caught one of the middle school kids saying that something, "sucks." If this were a contemporary show, I could forgive it, but I don't think characters in 1920's Japan should be channeling South Park. |
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Shenl742
Posts: 1525 |
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If you're being serious then that is an extremely low, rude and unprofessional thing to say. If you're trying to make a joke then it's not a very good one. [/i] |
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GrilledEelHamatsu
 Posts: 703 |
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I'm praying that Taisho does well. Its a very pleasant anime that's holds its own unique politically correct allagore without taking itself too seriously. Theron's review was spot on and the score was accurate. (I'm starting to really have a problem with Carlo's reviews, if DP doesn't do well, its his ass. But thats another story.) Baseball anime never seems to sell well both in Japan and America. Taisho Yakyuu Musume was a hit TVseries last year but the DVDs sold poorly. We all know how poorly The Big Windup was recieved on both sides of the atlantic, in fact the last time a baseball anime was a blockbuster was 1985's "Touch" which I recall ran for 3 seasons! |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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It's another story about you being paranoid, delusional and ridiculous, yes. |
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GrilledEelHamatsu
Posts: 703 |
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Frankly, as far as I'm concerned. Taisho Baseball Girls does right what Princess Nine(1998) did wrong a decade ago: Try to make a PC social commentary baseball anime about girls without coming across as overblown, too meldromatic, and mean sprited. In Taisho, the girls are cute,likable and have alot of chemistry together plus Taisho presents itself as a light slice of life title while Princess 9 fails to excute darker meldrama and lacks appeal and comes off as way too over the top.
Its ironic that Section23 licensed Princess 9 10 years ago back when they were ADV, whats also ironic is that Princess Nine was a huge flop that practicly faded into obscurity in Japan soon after it aired in the spring of 1998 and went OPP immediately after ADV completed the series in early 2002. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4477 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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and there are some thing about this that makes it interesting for me . Unfortunately like most of sentai licenses , it's another sub only title so for me it's a skip it . |
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Cryssoberyl
 Posts: 242 |
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This was a fair and balanced review of TYM. Well done.
Princess Nine is one of my all-time old favorites, so it's natural that I also enjoyed Taisho very much. (The yuri subtext helped a lot too.) As stated, it's cute without descending into cloying moe superficiality, but in addition, I personally thought that the feminist themes were given a surprisingly serious and face-on treatment - for an anime, at least. The feminist elements of Princess Nine were mostly concerned with the parochial attitudes of school officials and the male-dominated sports establishment toward the idea of a female baseball team. Taisho also touches on that aspect, but goes further by confronting, on a more personal level, the negative and close-minded attitudes toward women in general which even the girls' own families and acquaintances could harbor. This raises an interesting question: what is the explanation for this progression? Why does Taisho go further in this than Princess Nine did? Is it simply because Taisho is set in a significantly older era, where the struggle for equality was more fundamental in nature? Or could it be that, coming over a decade after Princess Nine, Taisho is the beneficiary of 10+ years worth of developing Japanese attitudes on the subject? Could Princess Nine have done in 1998 what Taisho did in 2009 and gotten away with it? I wonder... In any case, my only real complaint is that there isn't more of it. I would've liked to have seen the girls go on to play more games and continue to improve. |
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