Recently, I wrote about
Free! and
why I found it disappointing. I was expecting
Free! to be a sports anime, but it turned out to be more slice-of-life than slice-of-sports.
So what is a sports anime and what makes a great one?
Here’s a rundown of your typical sports anime:
1) The protagonist, a transfer student, is extremely talented at a sport and joins the team at his new school. Protagonist is usually arrogant or a loner or both, and the team is only middling at best.
2) The team is dazzled by their new member’s talents and skills, and starts winning more games against other schools.
3) But the other schools in their league also have their superstars, and the protagonist’s team (we’ll call them the “home team”) suffers setbacks, including injuries and game losses, sometimes due to the protagonist’s “go it alone” or “I can win this on my own” attitude.
4) The home team goes through a period of reflection and retrenchment. They all train harder and rework their strategies against the other teams, not leaving their success to chance or to their big star, the protagonist. Meanwhile the protagonist not only trains harder, but also realizes he must support his team and that the team has wanted him to join in with them the whole time.
5) Now renewed in health and outlook, having trained and practiced much harder and with the protagonist having become a genuine team player, the home team returns to the circuit and starts triumphing even over the tough schools. Their Cinderella comeback story is the talk of the town. Either they win the league championship, or else they finish closer to the top than anyone expected them to, and the series ends with the promise of the home team going for it all in the next season.
The best sports anime I’ve seen in a while is
Kuroko’s Basketball (
Kuroko no Basket or
Kuroko no Basuke). Oddly, in some ways it fits the model perfectly and in other ways it departs from it quite a bit. But in spirit it absolutely follows every tenet of what makes a great sports anime.
Taiga Kagami (Yuuki Ono) returns to Japan from America where he was living with his parents, who moved there for work. He joins Seirin High School’s basketball team and immediately impresses the team with his great athleticism and skills.
Kagami is ferociously competitive on the basketball court but socially a bit unskilled, a bull in a china shop. But he has a good heart and is a very hard worker at his game.
Tetsuya Kuroko (Kensho Ono) is a slightly-built, somewhat mysterious boy. The sixth man on the legendary Teiko Middle School basketball team, Kuroko is a genius at passing the ball to his teammates without the other side stopping him or sometimes—even
seeing him.
Though unobtrusive to the point of disappearing while standing with others, Kuroko has a secret agenda: to make Seirin’s basketball team a great team that can beat the high school teams of his former Teiko teammates, the five members of the “Generation of Miracles.” More on them in a minute.
Teppei Kiyoshi (Kenji Hamada) is Seirin’s big center. Originally Kiyoshi was supposed to be Seirin’s captain, but he turned the job over to his friend Junpei Hyuuga who Kiyoshi thought had the better edgier personality for it.
Kiyoshi is the team’s true heart, more even than the fiery newcomer Taiga Kagami or Kuroko, the shadow passer who adds so much to the team’s success. He’s a gentle giant, egoless and mature beyond his years, knowing when to use humor and saying exactly the right thing at the right time when the team needs comfort or a push.
Riko Aida (Chiwa Saito) is the team’s coach. She’s the daughter of a former high school basketball coach and learned strategy at her father’s knee.
The back story is that Teiko Middle School won the league basketball championship three years in a row, due to a line-up of five phenomenal players who came to be known as the “Generation of Miracles.”
Because this is anime ;-) – the five are also conveniently color-coded by hair color/eye color/name:
Daiki Aomine (Junichi Suwabe) is Touho Academy’s power forward. An aggressive and unpredictable player, Aomine was Teiko’s top scorer. Of the four Generation of Miracles players we’ve met so far, Aomine is the most openly arrogant, skipping practice and showing up late for games. His almost-unbelievable skills lead him to conclude that “the only one who can beat me… is me.”
Shintaro Midorima (Daisuke Ono) was Teiko’s pure shooter. A three-point specialist, he can make baskets even from far across the court.
Midorima is tall and humorless and strangely relies on “lucky items,” procuring odd things like a wooden sculpture of a bear with a fish in its mouth based on horoscope predictions.
Atsushi Murasakibara (Kenichi Suzumura), Teiko’s tall purple-haired center, is an odd man-child. Always eating candy and snacks and speaking in a lazy drawling voice, Murasakibara actually dislikes playing basketball but is incredibly talented at it.
Seijuro Akashi (Hiroshi Kamiya) was the Generation of Miracles’ captain and point guard. In the anime (through episode 5 of S2 at least) we haven’t seen him yet, only flashback-type glimpses of him, but in those scenes Akashi is shown as expecting victory in his games as a “given.”
Finally, my favorite Generation of Miracles player: Ryota Kise (Ryohei Kimura).
Kise works part-time as a male model and usually has gaggles of girls following him around. Sweet-natured and with a slightly goofy sense of humor, Kise is the friendliest and most accessible of the Generation of Miracles players.
He was brought into the sport of basketball by Aomine, and at the end of season 1 Kise has to face his former mentor in competition as they are now on different high school teams.
So what makes
Kuroko’s Basketball a great sports anime?
First,
Kuroko’s Basketball differs from the norm in that the arrogant player isn’t the protagonist, either Kagami or Kuroko, but the five Generation of Miracles players. They are the ones who are being schooled by Kuroko, who is turning Seirin into a worthy adversary by virtue of his miraculous passes and bringing Seirin together as a team. At one point, Kuroko confesses to Kagami that Teiko wasn’t a true team but more a collection of self-interested superstars. His desire is to build Seirin up and vindicate his own team way of basketball—Kuroko’s basketball.
This means that the viewer can root for Seirin unreservedly, as the team isn’t divided into a lone superstar protagonist vs. the rest of the team.
Kuroko’s Basketball also keeps a great pace. It doesn’t bog down with flashbacks or too many characters. So far it hasn’t delved into the characters’ family backgrounds or personal lives; the focus is on the game of basketball and the competition and friendships that come from playing the game.
The story is told with such a tight focus that I’m tempted to read the manga, as with most animes based on a manga I’m sure it’s following the manga closely. Tadatoshi Fujimaki is a skilled storyteller who cuts out unnecessary fat and filler and the result is a fast-moving and incredibly entertaining anime series.
I also like the story's treatment of females. Riko, Seirin’s coach, is shown as being no-nonsense and very competent and the boys trust and respect her. And aside from some mild boob humor (Touho Academy’s team manager Satsuki Momoi has a large chest and Riko is flat-chested, leading to some back-and-forth between the two), women and girls are presented as complete equals to the men and boys in the show.
It’s telling when I find my favorite characters in a show are supporting ones. My two favorite characters in
Kuroko’s Basketball aren’t Kagami and Kuroko but Teppei Kiyoshi and Ryota Kise.
Not because I don’t enjoy Kagami and Kuroko: I do, very much. But because there are so many good, interesting and appealing characters in
Kuroko’s Basketball, it’s a feast. You can take your pick.
Finally,
Kuroko’s Basketball is tremendously fun to watch. It’s fast-paced and the basketball sequences are well-animated – it’s easy to follow the action, you don’t need to know the rules of basketball. If you do need to know a rule, it’s explained in the course of the scene.
The characters vary in personality but all are good boys. Aomine comes the closest to being unlikable due to his arrogance, but even he is human. After fighting with Satsuki over being benched due to injuries, Satsuki runs off in tears and it’s implied that Aomine goes looking for her afterward to apologize.
In other words, you’re free to love everyone in the show. It’s one of the many things that makes
Kuroko’s Basketball easy to watch and enjoy.
If you’ve never watched a sports anime and are curious, you couldn’t do any better than
Kuroko’s Basketball.
