Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Play Ball – episode 1

August 14, 2005 on 6:44 pm | In Play Ball | 1 Comment

“The Legendary Captain”

I love sports anime. I never play sport, but I love anime about sport. I also love the Dezaki brothers. Take baseball and Dezaki Satoshi, you’ve got Play Ball. You also get some suspect character designs, but what can you do?

Taniguchi is a student who used to be a star baseball player. Unfortunately, he was so dedicated to pitching that he permanently damaged one of his fingers, which is now seemingly unable to bend. His family and friends are overly sensitive and do not talk about baseball around him.
In this first episode Aiki, the captain of the soccer team, asks Taniguchi to join based on the fact that you do not need your hands to play soccer. Konno, the team’s star player, thinks that Taniguchi has the wrong attitude and challenges him … both sides end up quite surprised.

While Play Ball does not look like it is epic, it definitely looks nice enough. I like children’s anime because the themes and characters can be fairly complex without too much worry. The designs of children’s anime are somewhat comforting to me, because they are very simple affairs that bring back memories of times before everything was exploding robots and love triangular artists.

There’s not a lot to say, because this episode is just about acceptance, perserverance and the suggestion that you shouldn’t always treat someone with kid gloves, because if they realise it their feelings will be hurt. Most importantly, we learn that matte is excellent.

Unfortunately, because I don’t exactly choose the mainest of the main stream shows, they sometimes don’t get subbed past the first episode. Still, and I say this with every such show that seems like it’s made just for me, I’ll keep on watching if they keep on giving it to me. I’ll just have to accept that the subbers can’t spell “orgasm” and be done with it.