DEAR BOYS

By Jasconius     October 24, 2003

The yaoi basketball anime! Okay well not really, but there *IS* this picture and all...



Heheh, actually Dear Boys wasn't nearly as terrible as I imagined it was going to be. The story is not bad, and amazingly, the pacing is not as atrocious as most shounen sports shows. That said, the animation is kinda crappy, not in the quality sense, as in it feels wrong, especially in the basketball scenes. Cheap animation might have actually been BETTER than the weird jerkiness and CG basketball/net that look completely wrong. The character designs look slightly better than the manga, and some of the girls are actually cute, along with the teacher, so overall it's okay in my eyes.



The story centers around Aikawa Kazuhiko, a former star basketball player for the Tendouji High School team who transfers to Mizuho High School because of problems with basketball just not being fun anymore living with his father and playing on that team. So he's living alone now, and he plans to join the basketball team here at Mizuho... except there's no boys' basketball team, only girls', a top-class team, actually. The reason for that is that the team was suspended a year ago after one of the star players, Fujiwara, got fed up with the coach telling them not to do their own thing, only listen to what he says, and punched him. The news spread around, and the team dwindled to just four players, Fujiwara and three of his close friends. Now with Aikawa, they finally have five players again, so they can actually play basketball, but somehow no one wants to. There's a bad air about the whole thing, but Aikawa settles it all by showing off his mad basketball skills and being his talkative, charming self. So by the end of episode three, the team is ready to play their first practice match... against the team coached by the guy that Fujiwara punched before!



"Wait!" you may be saying, "Why would JASC watch a sports anime for three whole episodes?!" Well, I had read that Mizuki Nana played a character in episode three, so I went ahead and watched it all... only to be disappointed in her three-line performance as Fujiwara's little sister... (see upper middle picture, char on left) Sigh.



Anyway, the story's not bad, the animation style is okay, the music is a bunch of crappy rap stuff from Avex (What, they figure everyone in Japan that plays basketball likes rap and hip-hop? Wait, come to think of it...), and overall the whole thing is pretty average in my book. Which puts it as one of the best sports anime ever! >.>