Ao Ashi Season Review

“You’ve done it again, Aoi. Just like a year ago. Almost all of the candidates had lost the will to fight, but… you never gave up. You kept on running, forging a new path, just like today.”

Ao Ashi has been one of the pleasant surprises of the spring and summer seasons. With strong writing and likable characters, the show proved consistently compelling despite being built around a subject matter that has never clicked with me in the past. It’s seriously strange that I’ve succeeded in finishing a series about American football, before I was able to finish a single title centered around soccer, despite the sport having a not insignificant number of titles under its belt. After more than a decade of sampling sports anime and manga ranging in quality from the previously hinted at and often mediocre Eyeshield 21 to the new-sequel warranting classics of Big Windup! and Chihayafuru, I have finally finished an anime about soccer. That alone would be worth celebrating, but even more importantly, Ao Ashi lands much closer in quality to the latter end of that spectrum than the former. With a strong emphasis on tactics and characters, Ao Ashi easily takes this season’s award for “Best Sports Series,” and is one of the strongest sports anime of the last few years.

The show centers on Ashito Aoi, a gifted if rather egocentric soccer-player who gets noticed by Tatsuya Fukuda, a soccer coach, as he travels through Ehime. Initially Fukuda is simply curious about Aoi, but upon chatting with him, he realizes the scope of Aoi’s spatial awareness extends to the entirety of the field, and Aoi can regularly recall every player’s positioning throughout a game. Furthermore, while he lacks a grasp of fundamentals, what tactics he does exhibit incorporate that broad awareness. Realizing Aoi’s potential, Fukuda invites him to come tryout for the Tokyo Esperion Football Club, and in doing so, pushes him to expand his skillset and develop as a player. From there, much of the show is focused around two avenues. The first is Aoi’s path as a player, as he rushes to catch up with the more experienced players he finds himself surrounded with. Having grown up in a remote area with little opportunity to encounter skilled teammates and opponents, Aoi starts off with a very self-focused play-style which both limits him and impedes his ability to play as a cohesive part of the team. The other key storyline element is directed towards exploring the inner workings of the team itself. The characters serve as the linchpin of any good sports series and Ao Ashi does a great job of allowing those characters and their various flavors of ego to bounce off one another.

Aoi himself incorporates elements of two significantly different types of sports anime protagonists. He possesses the analytical focus of characters like Taichi from Chihayafuru or even Mizushima from Ao Ashi’s Saturday partner for these past two seasons, Love All Play. His broad focus allows him to perceive all aspects of a game, and in time, construct plays to capitalize on the circumstances. However, he also possesses the brash enthusiastic features of characters like Chihaya herself from Chihayafuru, or perhaps even more apt a comparison would be Eijun Sawamura from Ace of Diamond. Both characters blend a lack of proper training with underlying, unpolished skills that can make them excellent players in the right circumstances. This subtle competency is contrasted with bombastic and arrogant proclamations. The exception to this comparison would be that, as best as I can remember, Aoi is much faster to come to terms with the fact that he is now a small fish in a huge pond. His anger at not being on par with his teammates both encourages him to improve and also checks his self-aggrandizing tendencies. The rest of the cast is engaging as well, with many of the characters having heartfelt moments and development, but as the lead, Aoi carries the bulk of the show. Ao Ashi may have some of my favorite character growth in a sports anime since Big Windup!.

That earlier comparison to Ace of Diamond has some layers to it, as Ao Ashi was also animated by Production I.G. and it’s gorgeous. Somewhere in the back of my head, I wondered if the studio might have orchestrated the release of this season’s Shoot! Goal to the Future just to remind viewers that soccer anime don’t usually look this good. The studio’s name doesn’t quite hold the same level of prestige that it possessed about a decade ago, but they still know how to make a sports series that is brimming with flair. This doesn’t match the level of kinetic energy which they brought to Haikyu!!, but that’s more praise for Haikyu!!’s visuals and less a condemnation of Ao Ashi. There is one visual quirk that gets overused, and that’s when Aoi takes a step back and takes stock of the positioning of everyone on the field. The series uses a visual of zooming in on a bird’s eye as it flies over the field. It’s an excessively dramatic visual that often crosses over into the realm of cheesy, and were the show less grounded, I might have thought he was literally controlling birds. The opening and endings are fine, but they probably won’t stick in my memory as much as the background soundtrack, which does a great job of being identifiable while not overshadowing the events on screen.

Before I wrap up a few, Notes and Nitpicks:

• If there is one element that I find mildly irritating about Ao Ashi’s approach to the game, it would be that it often will skip over explanations of some of the rules or terminology. This isn’t always the case, as they do have characters standing by to explain certain formations or plays, but I legitimately had to go and look up the Offside Rule to figure out what was going on during a game in the final act (For the record, it’s not nearly as complicated as Ted Lasso makes it sound).
• I’ve seen the title written as both one word or two. I suspect this is due to a collection of subtle alternative meanings to the name. I first saw it written as two words (literally ‘Blue Feet’), so I’m sticking with that.
• I’m not 100% confident in my assertion that I’ve never finished a soccer series, but I’m pretty close to certain. I know I watched the first couple episodes of Days, but wasn’t engaged enough in the characters to continue. I lost interest in the managerial focus of Giant Killing early on, Knight in the Area and Shoot! Goal to the Future were too dumb to stick with, and I legitimately forgot that Farewell, My Dear Cramer existed until I searched “soccer anime” just now. There’s a chance I might stick with Blue Lock, which is starting up this October, but my work schedule could inhibit that.
• I’ve seen some debate over the coaching approach that’s shown in this series, where the coaches will provide Aoi a hint of what he needs to do to improve, but refuse to explain outright. I get that that narrative device can be annoying, but I think the fact that Aoi is both headstrong and analytical makes it work. He won’t accept something unless he comprehends and digests it for himself, but he possesses the capability to do so. I get the complaint, but it never bothered me because of the characters at play.