English Dub Review: Tsurune “The Boy at the Kyudo Range”

Sports anime continues its attempt to hit the mark.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The show starts with a typical storytelling attempt to pull at the audience’s heartstrings: a flashback of the main character, Minato Narumiya, when he was a child. He stands with his mother at the Kyudo range, watching competitors fire their arrows into targets. Kyudo — a Japanese form of archery — immediately captures Minato’s heart as he watches the archers compete.

From this flashback, we’re thrown into the present, where Minato and his best friend, Seiya Takehaya, attend their first day of high school. They bump into their excitable childhood friend, Ryohei Yamanouchi, who introduces them to his homeroom teacher, “Tomi.” Tomi explains that the school is looking to reboot its forgotten Kyudo club, to which Ryohei exclaims that Minato and Seiya are experts at the sport. Minato immediately deflects the offer to join the club, confessing that because of his mother’s death a few years beforehand, he doesn’t have time for extracurriculars. Seiya sees through Minato’s visage, though, knowing that Minato “put Kyudo behind him” — surely for some brooding reason that the audience doesn’t know about yet.

After some convincing from Ryohei, Minato finally decides to join the Kyudo club — which is surprisingly booming with new potential members at its first meeting. When Tomi chooses Minato to demonstrate how Kyudo is properly executed, Minato reveals to the audience that he always carries around his old yugake (a three-fingered glove used for the sport.) However, when he puts the glove on and steadies himself to shoot, he shamefully misses every mark in front of everyone. He says something cryptic about how “nothing’s changed at all ever since that day,” leaves the school, cries, has an emotional nighttime bike ride, and later crosses paths with a mysterious, beautiful archer man who has perfect aim, glistening abs, and a pet owl for some reason.

Our Take

Ah yes, the new sports anime seems to have all our favorite archetypes of boy characters: The Reserved One, The Peppy One, The Angry One, The Popular One, and Deadmom. While two of the characters (Nanao Kisaragi and Kaito Onogi) didn’t really do much for the plot other than existing to be introduced, you can tell they’re important because the opening title sequence needs at least five guys to make it a boy band.

There’s nothing outstandingly bad or outstandingly good about the series thus far — it seems to be an average sports anime with some tropes that have been done to death. The concept of having Kyudo as the sport of interest for the show is intriguing (considering swimming, basketball, skating and the like have already been taken) but if handled incorrectly, it runs the risk of being boring. The art direction in the show is trying to avoid this by having the viewer go into a first-person POV as the arrow sails through the air, adding in some special effects along the way. With what is otherwise a simple sport, there needs to be an expansion of these sequences as the plot progresses. Think Ratatouille: it’s a movie about eating — a simple, everyday activity — but when we see the food critic take a bite of the ratatouille, we’re instantly transported back to his old cottage home, taking in the sights and sounds of his childhood — feeling the emotions that the critic feels as the flavors trigger his nostalgia.

Arrow scenes would benefit from a similar perspective — if shooting an arrow gives the character a flying sensation, the audience should feel like they’re flying, too — with visuals and sound effects to enhance it.

On the subject of SFX, from an audio editing perspective, the episode felt somewhat quiet. Sometimes it even felt as though sound effects were missing, or that a scene could have benefited from music. The empty air of the episode sort of contributed to its dull vibe — but it’s something that will hopefully fix itself by the end of the season.

So many things about Tsurune seem average — average voice acting, average plot points, average characters. Though, average can be a great thing — it leaves elbow room for the audience to be pleasantly surprised as the series continues, considering it’s not as predictable as it appears. One noteworthy trait about the show is the backgrounds — there’s nothing like beautiful scenery to take a viewer out of their living room and into the world of the story. However, Tsurune will need a lot more than that to keep its audience in their seats.

Hopefully, the stereotypical characters and plot tropes will be turned on their heads — if Tsurune truly wants to set itself apart from existing shows, that is. Otherwise, it may find itself tackled and buried by all the other sports anime out there — with very few fans in the stands.