The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Sorairo Utility

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Minami Aoba was troubled. She had no particular strengths or things she wanted to do. Leaving school behind, Minami searches for her own "special uniqueness." She stumbles upon the nearby golf practice range by chance. Approached by part-time worker Haruka Akane, Minami grasps the golf club—the "utility." And thus, it was the encounter between Minami and golf. Together with the genius golfer Haruka and Ayaka Hoshimi, who aspires to be an influencer, they seek the moment when they can become the "protagonist."

Sorairo Utility is an original anime series by Yostar Pictures and Pony Canyon. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Fridays.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Beyond the “mini” variety, I'm not going to pretend that I have any interest in golf. However, I truly believe that an interesting, fun anime can be made about any topic—all that matters is how one goes about it. I mean, I loved the last sapphic-charged golf anime we got (i.e., Birdie Wing) due to it turning golf into an extreme sport with high-stakes mob gambling.

Sorairo Utility, on the other hand, is very much grounded in the real world. It's about a girl whose main hobby, a certain gatcha game, has ended service leaving her with time, money, and nothing she wants to do.

In essence, this first episode is more about a personal journey than anything else. Minami is searching for a place where she belongs—though she is going about it in the completely wrong way. She tries out every club in her school—not to see which are fun but which she is instantly good at. And, surprising no one but herself, she's terrible at all of them.

With golf, she stumbles into it with a different mindset. She thinks it looks interesting when she sees Haruka take a swing. When she tries it out for the first time and fails, Haruka doesn't let her just quit—offhandedly making her promise to try again the next day. What she learns then from Haruka is the moral of this episode: you have to practice to be good—and even then things rarely go perfectly.

Minami is a character who wants the answers to life handed to her. She wants to know what she's good at. She wants to know how to enjoy golf. But the point of this series is that there are many things in life you have to figure out on your own. Others can help you but they can't give you the answer.

There are many reasons to play golf and many goals that people aim for in the sport. No one is more correct than any other. What's important is that Minami wants to find her reason—to play and meet others and see what they strive for. To her, golf is a journey of self-discovery—one to find out who she is and what's truly important to her.

All this is to say, this first episode of Sorairo Utility shows this to be an anime with a clear goal and a lot of heart. If it keeps up this level of quality, it should be worth watching.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

In my years of watching anime, I have learned one very important lesson: it doesn't matter if I couldn't possibly care less about a sport in real life, I may very well enjoy an anime series about it. Sadly, that doesn't seem to include golf shows because I haven't found one that works for me yet, and Sorairo Utility's first episode doesn't look like it will be the one to change that. Still, there's nothing objectionable about this, and a fair amount of elements that really work, so it's probably a me issue rather than an overall statement on the episode.

It certainly does the “gamer girl” stereotype better than Momentary Lily. Our heroine, Minami, has devoted her entire identity to a mobile game that's being discontinued, and that means that she has to find something different to become obsessed with. She dreams of finding some typical high school thing that will “unlock” her hidden potential and elevate her to the role of high school hero, but so far, she's bouncing hard off of virtually everything. Is it a little over the top? Sure, but I can tell you from personal experience that it's absolutely possible to be that bad at sports. Her lack of athletic ability, though, may not be an actual lack, but rather that no one bothered to teach her any of the sports she's trying, because that's the significant difference between her brief tenure on multiple school teams and her discovery of golf. The minute she's even thinking about golf as something she might try, third-year Haruka is right there, guiding her through the beginning steps. She's both keen to teach Minami and to make sure that Minami is hooked on the sport, which seems to be just the combination Minami needs.

Haruka's not alone in this, either. Minami only ends up at the local driving range because she stops to help Masa, an eighty-year-old man, carry his clubs, and he and his two friends instantly adopt Minami as their de facto granddaughter. As represented by the four people Minami meets, the local golfing community is remarkably friendly and welcoming, and that seems to be what's drawing her to it. Does it help that Haruka looks unbelievably beautiful and fit when she's golfing? Absolutely, and there's a real possibility that there could be some yuri down the line. However, I suspect it's more yuri-baiting, since this episode mostly involves Haruka teaching Minami how far apart her feet need to be and standing behind her to guide her swing. A third girl, middle school golf phenom Hoshimin, is also set to join the cast, so this may slot more comfortably in the CGDCT genre than anything else.

There are some truly beautiful lines to the art and animation, particularly when we see Haruka play, and if the character designs aren't all that exciting, the movement largely makes up for that. It hasn't successfully interested me in a golf show, but it is likely to appeal to people looking to see what cute girls get up to this season.

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James Beckett
Rating:
Being a sports-averse nerdling myself, I tend to judge any sports media first and foremost by how inspired and engaged I become in the subject matter. If we're going by some kind of linear scale, I'd say that the very top tier of exemplars would be Keijo!!!!!!!!, Megalobox, and of course, Air Bud 2: Golden Receiver. On the opposite end of the spectrum would be stories that actively make their sport of choice seem as boring, obtuse, or embarrassing as possible, like Highspeed Étoile, Fanfare of Adolescence, or of course, Air Bud IV: Seventh Inning Fetch. Golf anime are, in particular, a tough kind of story to get right because almost all of the sport's drama takes place in the silent seconds before the swing, and it's difficult to create high-tension conflict out of the natural ebb and flow of the game. Birdie Wing understood that the best way to make golf into great anime is to make it absolutely batshit insane, overwhelmingly charming, and also incredibly gay. Sorari Utility is a little too slice-of-lifey to make the sport into anything genuinely thrilling to watch, but it is still pretty darned charming (and also incredibly gay). Two out of three ain't bad!

What makes Sorairo Utility work is the strength of its main characters. Minami is just perky and naive enough to make us relate to her deep desire to discover That One Thing that she can pour all of her youthful energy and identity into without becoming annoyingly twee. Likewise, Haruka is the perfect mentor for our protagonist, as she can complement Minami's enthusiastic amateurishness with her own equally zesty style of passionate golf proselytizing. Their whole dynamic may not make gold inherently more thrilling or dramatic for people who aren't already into the sport, but their love of the game is still infectious enough to make the show work.

The characters also have decent chemistry, which probably explains how the original Sorairo Utility short film got enough buzz to justify ordering a full series. I don't want to get any romance fans too excited, because there's always the chance that the show ends up using its sapphic vibes as more of a tease for shippers than anything especially substantial. However, I will say that this anime is still way more overtly intimate than I was expecting. It's always a cliche when the particular closeness and, er, “tight grip” of the golf instructor is played up for its suggestive undertones, but there's hardly anything “under” about the luminescent blushes that burst from Minami's cheeks when Haruka is teaching her the proper technique with which to grip her golf stick. It's cute, is what I'm getting at, enough even to justify checking out a few more episodes to see where Minami's journey across life's front nine will take her.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

Like many other millennials, I was tormented with golf growing up. I wasn't forced to play or anything, but my dad hogged the TV watching seemingly endless tournaments every weekend. Countless hours I could have spent watching anime were instead wasted on dry footage of men in polo shirts wandering rolling grassy fields, hitting tiny balls with sticks while onlookers clapped politely. It seemed unfathomable that I would ever get anything out of the sport, or at least not without candy-colored balls and windmills. I told myself Birdie Wing was an exception, because the mafia and stunt shots were approximately equivalent to KISS-theming and black lights.

But this? This is just a straightforward anime about girls playing golf. It follows all the usual beats of high school girl sports anime: Minami is a first year searching for her passion. After failing miserably at everything else, she stumbles into a driving range. Haruka, an attractive and competent third-year student employee takes an interest in her, and after some fumbles, she hits the one perfect shot that ignites her passion. It's just par for the course. (Hooray for using a thematically appropriate sports analogy!) We've all been here before, and more often than not, it puts me to sleep.

But to my great shock, I found I was having a great time. Watching a straightforward anime… about golf? Heaven forfend! I put the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of director Kengo Saitō, a Trigger alum who has brought his experience with the bouncy, expressive animation styles of works like Little Witch Academia and Promare to the course. Minami and Haruka's conversations about golf and practice swinging have a liveliness to them that grabbed my attention much more than the equivalent in other series. I also didn't feel like I was supposed to be cooing, “Awww, how adorable!” at them every five seconds. Much to the contrary, the shots of Haruka swinging her club highlight the athleticism and strength involved. It also made me think that men's professional golf would be much more interesting if played shirtless.