Why I Dropped 'Tamayomi'

I was very willing to give Tamayomi a chance, a fair shot this spring season. However, after the most recent fourth episode I am done with the show. Admittedly, I like the set up. A former powerhouse that had fallen from grace with their team having been decimated, on the road to a rebuild. Not too dissimilar from a certain volleyball anime I love, however the weaknesses start to come up throughout the show and smack you in the face.

Right off the bat, this is a girls team and so I am not expecting the dynamic between them to be similar to that of a guys team. That being said, there is not a lot of conflict within the team, if they need something they will get it and so the point from not having a full team to playing their first match does not feel earned. Let's look at another anime that starts their team from a similar situation Ahiru no Sora. This will not be the only time I will use Ahiru as a benchmark. Kuramatani in Ahiru had to scratch and claw a team together over the course of a better part of twenty episodes and by the time he gets to play in the qualifiers it feels earned. Granted this is a 12 episode season so you cannot spend a lot of time just bringing the team together and therein lies the first problem. As a result of the season being 12 episodes, and especially because it is a sports show there is no time to see any growth in the characters and assembling a team seemed unearned especially when you consider the calibre of players we are told that they have. We are only ever shown glimpses with the exception of the pitcher and the catcher.

Initially the pitch at which the girls spoke in, grated on me, however I was able to adapt and carry on with the show without much trouble after episode two. The larger problem lies in the characters, the way a sports anime makes the team interesting is by having unique character designs and/or having unique character personalities and traits to them. This is something even Ace of Diamond got right despite my gripes with the show. All the girls have similar personalities or the exact same personality, and they are all about as interesting as a piece of soggy cardboard. What's worse is that the one girl that does stand out is a twin and so I have no idea which one is which half the time because the show does a poor job of keeping them distinct. Even then she who stands out is an annoying character that has future sex offender written all over her, so even then it's still terrible.

These are all things that I am willing to forgive, however when episode four came around, I could not even finish watching it. So they have their first match as a team, against a good team no less. The standard of animation in this episode is frankly embarrassing to watch. Now to go back to Ahiru no Sora, it is not a high animation level show. There are a lot of reused animation, and still frames during the matches and the dialogue sections. What manages to carry it is the editing, sound design, and the emotion injected into every frame of this show. From an animation stand point, Ahiru no Sora is consistent, there are no large dips in quality. The animation for Tamayomi in this episode, dives off of a metaphorical cliff. The character models are misshapen, the outlines are blurred and thick in a way that shows images has been zoomed into, the movement of the characters feel as if what we are seeing is only the key animation rather than key animation and in between animation. The pacing is terrible and sometimes the animation is so bad you cannot tell which character is which outside the twins. This is the worst, in a technical sense, episode of anime that I have ever watched, no exaggeration.

This show managed not to meet my most conservative expectations and so I will not be watching any more of this show. Instead give me a spin off of the girls team from either Haikyuu! or Ahiru no Sora, they are much more interesting.