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.
I told myself I was going to take today off. No such luck, I suppose. Rarely have I been this annoyed by an anime’s opening episode, consider this one unofficially—and when I put it in the archive, maybe actually officially—slapped with the [Negative Review] tag. Maybe bring in Fantano’s “NOT GOOD” just to underscore the point.
Sometimes, a work of art comes along, and it is not bad on the technical level, but it has such a clearly poor understanding of the medium or genre that it’s working in, that the base level technical competence is not enough. Work made with, if not active contempt, certainly a lack of care. An assumption that you don’t really need to try because, hey, the people who like this shit will watch anything, right? Making it is so easy, so why make it good?
This, fundamentally, is what Sorairo Utility is an example of.
We will spend very little time here talking about Sorairo Utility‘s “plot”, since I am more interested in its failure as a presentation, but certainly we can lay out the basics. High schooler Minami Aoba [Takagi Miyu] finds herself in crisis when her favorite mobage is shut down, as she no longer has a huge fucking waste of time to sink all of her money and effort into. Her friend, Akina Izumi [Hanamori Yumiri], suggests she join a club. Aoba spends much of the early part of the episode trying out various things; basketball, baseball, badmiton, traditional tea ceremony arrangement, tennis, sewing, etc. and finding that she sucks at all of them. She doesn’t quite care that she sucks for the reasons you might expect. Instead of being frustrated at being at a beginner level—an understandable thing—she is frustrated that none of this comes naturally to her. That itself would be understandable, even relatable, if it were for its own sake. I certainly have sometimes felt like I have no particular talents, and if the show were to explore that it would maybe be genuinely interesting. Instead, Aoba reveals herself to be, on a basic conceptual level, a gender-flip of a certain kind of narou-kei protagonist. She is mad that she can’t do any of this because it makes her “an NPC” instead of “the protagonist.” Oh god, she’s one of those people.
Aoba’s whole general vibe is my first problem with Sorairo Utility. It’s fine enough to write a character who’s bad at things, it’s even fine to write a character who’s sort of obnoxious about being bad at things, but you need to give her an actual motive. Certainly, there is a kind of person who is perpetually mad that they’re not instantly great at everything and are thus not the protagonist of reality, but just because that kind of person exists doesn’t necessarily mean they’re inherently interesting to watch.
Misstep one is thus that Aoba is just radioactively annoying, not in the fun way—I am on record as usually liking anime girls with bad personalities, ones with blue hair, even—but in a way that just makes you want to block them on Discord and never speak with them again. It’s made all the worse by the fact that her friend Izumi, a gyaru who joins the shogi club, is sitting right there, a much more interesting character embodying a frankly more unique setup overall, but who is in this anime relegated to a supporting player. Aoba’s personality has a “how do you do fellow kids?” stink to it as well, in that the writers seem to think that being obsessed with all those mobile phone video games the kids love and thinking of herself and reality in aggravatingly tropey terms—I used to use the TVTropes.org forums, I am an expert on this subject—are relatable and interesting qualities instead of profoundly irritating ones. I do not think this is an issue of my own age, either. It’s hard to imagine anyone finding Aoba endearing.
So OK, the protagonist kind of sucks. That’s bad, but she’s not alone, right? There’s an extended cast supporting her, surely? Nominally, this is true, but aside from Izumi there’s not much evidence in this first episode of any of these people being interesting. We’ll skip ahead to Aoba meeting Akane Haruka [Amami Yurina], deliberately overlooking the old man who is responsible for Aoba ending up at a golf range in the first place, since he’s just a walking Old People Are Old joke. Haruka becomes Aoba’s golf instructor over the course of this first episode. Given that these are two women, one of whom instructs another in a sport, you’d think there’d be some chemistry here. Not necessarily romantic chemistry, although that’d certainly be ideal, but something, right? Indeed, the show actually does make attempts to paint Aoba’s interest in golf that way. She seems to find Haruka’s form as she golfs impressive and maybe even attractive, but to talk about why that doesn’t really come off how it’s presumably supposed to, we need to talk about the show’s presentation, or rather it’s lack thereof.
Look, TV anime is in such a place as a medium right now that complaining that a show merely looks mid, man is always going to feel wrong. Nonetheless, that’s what I’m going to do here. There is a whole tidal wave of isekai dreck that I have not covered this season, because I’m trying to be nicer to myself and to my readers. I have no expectations for 99% of that shit. When it turns out to be bad, I’m not disappointed. I shrug my shoulders and wave my hands and say “well, it sucks, but I knew it was going to suck.” Something like this is a different thing. I didn’t necessarily go into Sorairo Utility thinking it would be a masterpiece, but the loosely-defined “girls get into some kind of hobby and are very passionate about it” supergenre comes with a certain set of expectations, and throughout, Sorairo Utility meets the letter of those expectations while stridently avoiding their spirit. Let’s hone in on one very specific example.
A common visual piece, one might even say internal cliché, to the aforementioned umbrella genre is the “passion ignited” sequence. This takes roughly the same form in most anime it’s in: our protagonist witnesses that special something being done just so, and it lights a fire in her heart. Often there’s a juxtaposition where we cut from the protagonist’s face, to the action being witnessed, and then back to their face as their expression slowly lights up with their new lease on life. Sometimes this happens several times, oftentimes there’s embellishment of reality as the sequence comes to an end; wind in the hair that can’t logically be there, lights that shine down from nowhere. Yes, our heroine decides, I am going to dedicate my life, or at least some part of it, to this. Naturally, Sorairo Utility has one of these, and like the rest of the show’s visual work, in isolation it looks fine, but when placed in the larger context of the show there’s a certain uncanny, going-through-the-motions-ness to it. I love these sequences; the best of them make you feel actively jealous of the protagonist, who has very literally found something to live for. Sorairo Utility‘s, despite being composed on a technical level just as well as anyone’s, makes me feel nothing. I even went back and rewatched it while writing this just to make sure it wasn’t the environment I was in while watching the show, some other aspect of my mood, something independent from the work itself. Nope! Nada. Hit it with a stick and it rings: it’s hollow.
In a broad sense, there is an ineffable lack of style that permeates the whole episode and, since the first is rarely the worst looking episode of an anime, probably the whole show. The show just feels fundamentally without passion. You can’t make an effective anime in this genre, a genre whose entire point is finding passion in things, even things some would deride as mundane or stupid, without having passion yourself. I don’t want to come out and say that no one who worked on this cared about it, but it definitely at least gives that impression. This is also why the anime’s attempts to play up a flirty tension between Aoba and Haruka don’t work, aside from some other nitpicks I could make as a yuri fan (the two just don’t look good together, mainly), the feelings conveyed here just don’t come across. I can see what the series wants me to feel, I just don’t feel it.
Now I’m going to start being mean. Birdie Wing, a very different anime than this on just about every level, does not factor into this conversation. There aren’t really many anime of this type about golf, and Birdie Wing‘s globe-trotting adventure spirit is just a different thing entirely, so to compare them directly is unfair, even if I really want to, in order to point out how that show is both a better sports anime and a gayer one. Here’s what absolutely is a fair comparison though, almost every other goddamn anime in this broad genre.
Remember, we’re comparing Sorairo Utility not to other golf anime, of which there are very few, but other anime that revolve around a girl or group of girls getting into some hobby, some sport, some field, to use the broadest possible word, and living and breathing it. Again we come back to Aoba as a huge a problem here, even late in the episode, in addition to everything else, she just doesn’t actually seem that into golf. (Worth noting in an aside; when Haruka wants to cheer her on, her pump-your-girl-up catchphrase is “become the protagonist,” which, holy shit, yuck.) Compare her to someone like Uma Musume‘s Special Week, a golden-hearted sweetie who is similarly vague in her goals at first but grows to love her sport within just the first few episodes in a very heartfelt way the feels real. Compare her to Yua Serufu of forever-underrated Pine Jam woodworking anime Do It Yourself!, a lovable gremlin whose affinity for the DIY of the title stems from her relationship with her childhood friend. Sonoue Masaki, from Mayonaka Punch, whose deep love for—of all possible things!—making stupid Youtube videos is practically her animus for existence, so much that she persists through getting extremely cancelled for punching a co-host on camera and rises from death like her vampire girlfriend to get back on the scene? Asakusa Midori of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, still one of the best anime of the decade, and her burning passion for animation and direction, which is reflected in the series itself? The prognosis starts looking even worse if we get into anime where the passion in question is music. If you stack Aoba up against almost any of those girls, she simply looks ridiculous. Tamaki Kyouka from SHINEPOST? Takasaki Yuu from Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, whose “passion ignited” sequence, there married to a full-on music video, was such a fucking barnburner that it was able to take up a huge chunk of that show’s first episode and not feel unearned? Bocchi, she of The Rock? Iseri fucking Nina??? None of these shows are perfect 1 to 1 comparisons, and some of them are polarizing, but I dare anyone to walk out of the first episode of any of them without feeling that these diverse fields mean the absolute world to their protagonists. That comes through in the passion of those anime, and of course the staff who make them, for the subject matter, to greater or lesser degrees.
That is the real, central problem with Sorairo Utility, as of this first episode. It has no actual investment in its own subject matter. It’s hard to make golf visually interesting! That’s a fair point! But come on, fucking try! There is no world where Haruka should be giving her big inspirational speech about how she’s looking to make just one perfect shot, and then have that point “illustrated” by her listlessly plonking a cheap prefab CGI golfball into a net.
I will confess that I always feel pretty bad about writing something this negative. But I feel like I have to. In a sense, I have to give the show credit for making me feel something. Whenever the millionth narou-kei adaptation is bad, I have no reaction whatsoever. Anger and annoyance are, at least, emotional responses. I actually saw a couple people complain about this show before I watched it myself, and foolishly, I rolled my eyes a little. How bad can an anime about girls learning to love life through the medium of some sport or hobby or whatever really be? About this bad, apparently. At least Tamayomi and Pride of Orange had the decency to be ugly, too.
It is not, theoretically, impossible for this series to improve, but when the first episode itself simply feels so artless I do not have a lot of hope. (I feel a perverse inclination to keep watching it just to see if it can redeem itself, but if I’m being honest, I will probably not actually do that. Remember, trying to be nicer to myself.) Aoba feels, compared to all of those other people I just mentioned, like a phony. She doesn’t actually care about golf, she just wants to be special. Sorairo Utility doesn’t actually care about golf, it just wants you to like it. There’s a similarity there, for sure, and if it were intentional I’d feel obligated to give the show some credit, but it clearly isn’t, so I can’t. I do have to pause and give some credit due to the OP and ED animations, both genuinely very nice and the former much better at selling the supposed joy of the sport than the show itself. Cut those out of the anime and pretend they’re standalone (like the OVA that originally started this project, which I’m told is much better overall), and you can pretend Sorairo Utility is fun and good and interesting. But that’s the problem; you’re pretending, as this show is none of those things. Don’t waste your time.
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The Magic Planet 