Love All Play First Impressions

“He’ll be fine. Don’t you think Ryo has changed some since he started badminton?”

Sometimes a show has all the components needed to tell a compelling story, but is unable to compile those disparate elements properly. That’s my roundabout way of saying that execution is everything, and Love All Play fumbles hard in that aspect. This first episode covers a lot of ground, and it almost feels like the beginning of a second season where the show wants to remind you of all the developments that happened previously. This results in a scattered and unsatisfying first episode. By the time we’re even at the halfway mark, the program is throwing out existential questions about the perspective of a character whom we only just met. Somehow Love All Play shoves at least 3 episodes of content into this premiere while leaving little to no room for the sport the show is based around. I’ve seen shows that begin with nightmarish pacing only to slow down after the opening and find a more reasonable rhythm. Hopefully, Love All Play will collect itself and progress forward at a calmer pace, but as things currently stand, I can’t recommend it based on this first episode.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of sports anime protagonists. The first is the uninitiated protagonist who’s encountering the sport for the first time. In shows like Baby Steps, Stars Align, and last year’s Burning Kabbadi, at least one of our leads falls into this category. The second type is the initiated protagonist who is already familiar with the sport and has a history with it. This is seen in series like Haikyuu!!, Big Windup!, and Love All Play. One of the advantages of this type of protagonist is that the series can begin in medias res and avoid the natural lull in storytelling that would accompany our lead learning about the basics of the game. However, in this case, the show starts off right at the very beginning of a transition point for our main character. To really encapsulate the scope of what is covered in this episode, let’s walk through each of the major plot points. First, we are introduced to Mizushima Ryo, a third-year middle schooler who plays badminton as part of his school’s club. Next we are told of his fascination with the high school badminton player, Yusa Kento, who attends Yokohama Minato High School. One of Ryo’s friends, Shizuo, suggests that Ryo try to attend Yokohama Minato, but Ryo dismisses it as an impossibility. Ryo then gets called to a meeting with his homeroom teacher and badminton advisor where he is introduced to Yokohama Minato’s badminton coach who is interested in having Ryo attend the school on an athletic recommendation. Ryo is torn due to his lack of confidence and the fact that he’d planned to attend the same school as his friends and he reflects on how it was simply a happy accident that they had even joined the club in the first place. Ryo then presents the possibility of attending Yokohama Minato to his parents and sister. His father balks at the idea of his son attending a school on an athletic recommendation, because an injury could disrupt his education. Ryo meekly accepts his father’s stance, but his older sister confronts him and pushes him to look inward and determine what he would like to do. I’m going to stop my summary there. That’s about everything that happens in this episode… wait, I misread my notes. That’s most of what happens in the first half of the episode, and this isn’t one of those premieres that chooses to skip the OP so that takes up all of 10 minutes!

I wonder if some of the narrative issues are due to this being an adaptation of a series of novels. There is a lot of tell-don’t-show going on here, and this episode comes across more like someone just talking me through the plot rather than experiencing it first hand. We’re told that badminton has helped Ryo come out of his shell, but we don’t see it. We’re told he’s just an okay player at the moment, but we don’t see that. It’s not a captivating way to experience a story. This is a co-production between Nippon Animation and OLM. Both studios have been around for a while, but OLM has been doing rather well with recent critical hits like Odd Taxi and Komi Can’t Communicate which will be returning this season, but Nippon Animation hasn’t been heavily involved in seasonal anime in a while. They released a series about cute girls making pottery last year, which I vaguely remember existing. The production here looks nice enough, but we only get a few short clips of the sport itself being played, so it’s difficult to give a nuanced assessment.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• There was a point where I started putting my notes together for my review, only to realize when I was about 2/3 of the way through it that I still hadn’t finished the episode. There are multiple scenes in this episode that feel like reasonable stopping points, but it just keeps going.
• I was originally going to go through the entire episode, but I realized that, by the time I was halfway through, my point had probably been made.
• My best point of comparison when it comes to a series with a strong foundation which speeds through a bunch of plot in the first episode would be Those Snow White Notes. After that introduction, the show was able to adjust its pacing and became much better for it, but I’ll also note that the issue was far less egregious in that instance.
• Shueisha has a manga adaptation of the novels that is going to be starting up next week. I won’t be checking it out personally, but I wonder if it will suffer from the same issues as the anime.
• One of the more notable things about Nippon Animation is that back in the 70’s one of its employees suddenly quit working on their adaptation of Anne of Green Gables to go work on some little known Lupin III film, The Castle of Cagliostro. Makes you wonder what ever happened to that Miyazaki fellow.