Tag: Birdie Wing season 2

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal Anime First Impressions: BIRDIE WING Swings Again

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

For a little while, it seemed like we might not even get more Birdie Wing. The announcement of a second season came late in the first’s run, and even after it was announced, it ended up delayed, being pushed from the early winter deadzone to, well, now, the feverish pitch of an absolute monster of a season. Birdie Wing is not one to shrink from the competition; much like Eve herself, the presence of those ostensibly bigger and badder just drives Birdie Wing to new heights. Is it still fundamentally the same mid-budget goofy fucking golf battle girl anime we saw back in season one? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Not even a little bit. Birdie Wing swings in like it never left, picking up immediately from the last minor plot line in Season 1, and establishing a whole host of new things in the process.

It’s tempting to go on about, say, Aoi being cranky that she doesn’t win a kiss from Eve, but honestly the real focus of the second season’s first episode is relative newcomer Iijima Kaoruko. Compared to Eve’s more out there opponents, she’s pretty straight-laced, and her motive seems to mainly be to show up her former coach (that’d be Reiya Amuro, the Gundam-themed hardass who serves as one of the show’s big references to that other Bandai franchise with lesbians that’s returning soon). Iijima is one of a few characters with proper “golf powers”, like what Eve has with her “Bullet” shots. She can enter “the Zone”—which she does by gravely intoning “In The Zone” in English—wherein an orange filter douses the golf course and a line of flowers sprouts up along the route she needs to take to her goal. You don’t need me to tell you this is silly. Silly is Birdie Wing’s bread and butter, but god damn is this silly. It’s also kind of great. (Presumably, the flowers represent The Power of Lesbianism. Iijima never actually says anything to strongly indicate she’s gay, but, come on, it’s Birdie Wing.) The Zone, and its more advanced version, In The Zone: Deep, are basically golf kaio-kens, in that they confer incredible power but burn through Iijima’s energy pretty quickly.

None of this really even remotely fazes Eve, who continues to treat golf of all types like a life-or-death situation that she’s nonetheless having a blast playing her way out of. This episode does not reach the heights of when that was literal back in Season 1, but I must imagine it’s going to head there before too long. Birdie Wing is not the short of show that knows much about restraint.

We also learn a little more about Eve’s backstory here, including the pretty incredible notion that Leo, the man who taught her to play golf and Birdie Wing‘s local Char Aznable xerox, seems to have thought she possibly had the potential to be some sort of Golf Chosen One. This isn’t elaborated upon here, but if Birdie Wing plans to aim for ever-greater heights—and it really seems like it is—there are worse ways to do that than to rope the flightly concepts of destiny and fate into your show’s narrative. For now, we mostly get some stuff about her unlocking a new bullet color (which seems to leave her dazed and confused upon use in the episode’s final scene). In the end, she blows Iijima out of the water; another victim to Eve’s golf-murder spree.

Golfing!

There are a few other things that come up here as well (whatever is going on with Aoi suddenly developing a headache certainly seems like it’ll be important going forward), but really, the main thing is just the relief that Birdie Wing is what it’s always been. Good old fashioned normal golf; from a universe much cooler than ours.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) BIRDIE WING -GOLF GIRLS STORY- Just Doesn’t Give a Damn

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“The Symphogear of Golf”

-Blurb for a now-deleted review of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.

Just accept that it makes no sense. Birdie Wing doesn’t care about your feelings—toward golf or toward anything else—and that includes how serious you think it’s being. This is sports anime as Rorschach Blot, a series that practically dares you to take it on its own terms even as it’s consistently the goofiest fucking thing that aired in its season.

Consider this; it’s ED theme (which I may or may not be listening to as I write this), is the achingly beautiful Tsukuyomi track “Nightjar.” For a series like this, it’s totally incongruous as an ending at first glance; a deeply sincere piece of work attached to an anime that is on its face, absolutely ludicrous. It’s right there in the premise; golf taken as deadly-serious as a shonen martial arts tournament or a mob movie, with all the camp that tonal dissonance implies. Over Birdie Wing‘s criminally short 13-episode first season, lives and livelihoods alike are staked on golf games. Pride is, too, and absolutely all of this is given the same narrative weight. (With one exception, as we’ll get to.)

Somehow, in that ED, when a shot of a golf ball dissolves into the night sky, an eagle cutting a shadowy figure against the moon, it makes a kind of sense. If it’s absurd, it’s not in a bad way at all.

It begins with illegal betting; our protagonist Eve (Akari Kitou) makes what little money she can to support her adoptive family by pulling off impossible shots. Golf balls fire like revolver bullets between moving train cars and lop the limbs off of trees. It’s totally insane, and, in its own way, hilarious. But as Eve meets her rival / golf girlfriend Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto), and the series continues to tick on, things like that just keep happening. Every time, you expect Birdie Wing to tip its hand and reveal that the entire thing is a joke, but it never does. Not when we’re introduced to Golf Mafia Boss Rose Aleone (Toa Yukinari), not when we see that another mob boss owns an illegal underground course that can physically morph its shape into a new, random course every time, not when Eve’s first major hurdle as a player is a woman with a snake motif named Viper the Reaper (Kaori Nazuka) who tries to psyche her opponents out with a scented tattoo. Not ever. It almost feels like a challenge, Birdie Wing dares you to blink first, because it certainly isn’t going to. About the closest it ever gets is this joke about Eve’s inexplicable, fluent Japanese.

Rose Aleone eventually dies. Seriously, she loses a golf game, and her life is snuffed out in a pastiche of old gangster movies that is way, way better and more genuine than it really seems like it should be. Eve moves to Japan and effectively stars in a second, different, marginally more conventional absurd-serious golf anime for the series’ second half. That shouldn’t really work either. It does too, to the surprise of no one. I’ve barely even found time to mention the flirty toying that Eve and Aoi are constantly engaged in. It definitely slots the series comfortably next to, if not outright in, the yuri genre.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing Birdie Wing and rather little elaborating on my own feelings on it. To tell the truth, because of its nature wherein what one brings to Birdie Wing strongly influences what one takes away from it, I almost think it’s not really meant for people like me. Folks who can’t really shut off the analytical part of their brain even when they’re totally enjoying something. But enjoy it I did, so on the other hand, maybe I’ve been played as thoroughly as any other member of this show’s audience. (In this respect, it very much is like Symphogear, making it the second anime in as many weeks that I’ve reviewed to have some trace of the seminal singing-girls-punch-things anime in it.)

Let me put it this way. Late in the series, we’re introduced to supporting character Kinue Jinguuji (Mai Nakahara). Jinguuji is a fairly classic character in the “had to give up on her dreams because a passion for something is not the same as being good at it” mold, something many other anime have done before and plenty others have done in a way that is, at least on paper, more poignant. But somehow, the fact that Jinguuji’s dream is this—golfing, the most boring sport in the world, and one of the hardest to take seriously—makes what would ordinarily be a light tap feel like a sucker punch. Through sheer commitment to the bit, Birdie Wing will make you care about this.

In the end, the show’s first season ends in a shrug, setting up more plot points than it resolves. Why? Because it knows it’ll return like a golfing T-1000. The 13-episode count was a fakeout, and season two is slated for next winter. What else is there to say? Bury Birdie shallow, it’ll be back.

Update: Season two has premiered! You can read my coverage here.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.