I should have done this long ago. But it's time that I set the record straight. Time that I finally shined a light on the truth of things. It's time I gave my final review... for Free!.
With everything else I've been watching, I can safely say that of everything I will likely ever watch, this will wind up being the best worst anime I will ever have to see.
Yeah. I can't believe I'm saying it either.
Months after this show has stopped airing, somehow it continues to dominate the sales charts - and honestly, I can't say I am really all that surprised. After all, this entire show was, at its core, a brilliant marketing scheme aimed directly at young women - a fact I have harped upon time and again during my brief stint watching this show in its entirety.
I feel that I should take a moment and clarify things: What makes an anime 'bad'? Well, there's a lot of things that can combine to make something bad, but in general, an anime that is 'bad' is one that kind of detracts from the genre as a whole. Things that, if someone were to watch, would completely turn them off from ever watching anime ever, writing them off as 'horrible shows exactly like that one I just watched'.
In short, they are shows which, viewed from the outside, appear to be completely and utterly horrible manifestations of everything negative said about anime ever.
Anime, like everything else, is a very broad genre. It's like how TV shows are... well, a very broad market as well. It's an overgeneralized term, but if all people see of TV are Jersey Shore, The Real World, or Duck Dynasty... how the hell can we ever expect to get them to sit down and watch other things like Castle, or Marvels Agents of SHIELD, or Doctor Who? Like with movies: how can you get people into theaters when everything seems to be the same goddamn movie time and again?
So with all of that said: Yes, I still classify Free! as a 'bad' show. But let me explain why, with one of those lovely little grading scales.
Art & Animation
Without a doubt... this is actually the best part of this show, and I am not even ashamed to give it a solid A. Sure, some of the water effects were a little cheesy, but the sheer amount of detail that went into each and every character's movements only added to the show as a whole. I might even go so far as to suggest this is the best animated anime series I've seen all year - even above Kill la Kill (which is still currently airing at this time of writing).
So why not an A+? Frankly, I was very tempted to give it such accolades, but because it is a TV show, it is nigh impossible for it to reach such a high level of quality. Though, going back to look through some of the screencaps I grabbed... it might well be justified, just for Haru's incredibly horrible renditions of what would soon become the team's mascot character, and the animations that straight up should have been on an instructional DVD for swim classes.
... holy shit. I just argued myself a case to give this show an A+ for Art and Animation. F**k.
Story & Plot
While not the worst part of the show, it's definitely a damn contender. But as a category overall, it definitely gets the worst grade of all four categories: F-
I'm sorry, you didn't know an F- was possible? Well now you do.
Here's why: There is no story. There's barely anything you could call a plot. Every time they try to do things that resemble plot, every single time, the issue is immediately resolved in the first three minutes of the next episode and it winds up having no real lasting impressions on the boys as a group. Everything gets glossed over because the story means nothing at all. They are just the excuses they keep chaining together in order to show off young, half-naked men zooming through a giant pool for as long as they can manage.
The plot is laughable. A so-called friend moves away from home and grows up to be a douchebag who hates his old best buddy for somehow managing to take away his single joy in life: swimming. Despite him leaving the country for that very reason. He gives up swimming, yet keeps going to swimming schools. It makes no goddamn sense, but only serves to act as the token 'catalyst' necessary to keep boys jumping in pools, because there's supposed to be some kind of conflict in an anime, right?
Plus, the show itself kept moving from being a serious slice-of-life-firmly-rooted-in-reality to openly existing in a Perfect Anime World. Like how everything just conveniently comes together despite the utterly ridiculous implausibility of the entire situation at a whole. Add to the fact that the characters are always exonerated from any decisions they will ever make (see: final episode) and you have yourself a show that, quite clearly, just does not have anything resembling a cohesive story.
I guess making a show about swimming is hard. But at least they could have f***ing TRIED.
Music & SFX
Hoo boy. This show... it has a very interesting musical selection, to say the very least. While the music itself isn't all that terrible, I feel like it really doesn't suit the show at all. It's also not very memorable, the only thing I can really remember is GENERIC EPIC WUBWUBSTEP TO PUMP YOU UP. Hell, I remember most of the OP by sight, not by it's music. I can't even remember how that shit went. Which can only be a blessing in disguise.
As for SFX, they fared a bit better. Creative use of certain effects did help to add some dramatic tension to things, but more to the point where it just became almost a joke. The effects existed to over-emphasize dramatic moments, and all it did was make me laugh at just how very over the top they kept trying to make the show. While not necessarily a bad thing, it didn't help that this show kept trying to pull itself in too many directions, and therefore the SFX really didn't help cement the mood they were (seemingly) trying to go for, which was a semi-serious show.
I mean come on, when you begin every episode with "this is a work of fiction" clearly you are pretending to take yourself seriously.
Character Design & Theming
All right. Here we go. This right here is the motherlode. The one category that has both the most ingenious and the absolute worst aspects of this show all rolled into one. I'm talking about the Character Design.
Visually, every single character is distinct, being easily identifiable from a single glance. Plus, all of the characters have one or two little quirks of their own which give the illusion of having a personality that is somewhat different from the others. Nagi is small and annoying, Haru is a corpse, and Mako is a gentle giant.
However, for all their great design, the characters fail to have any actual character to them. To the point where they just become completely unrealistic in an anime that goes out of its way to tell you it is not based on real people. As if real people could ever even act like this! Maybe that's the reason for the warning, come to think of it: To remind the lowest common denominator that people this stupid clearly could never exist. Even though you'd probably have to be that stupid in order to believe they do.
The worst part is that no matter what happens, the characters always always always do whatever the plot says they are supposed to do, instead of making the plot with their own character. People get shoehorned into doing things that make no sense at all, and everyone around them just glosses over it all. Plus, let's not forget the fact that all of the characters have been gender-bent. All the boys should be girls, and the girls should be boys. Reverse that and make this a show about young girls swimming without changing a single thing, and you know what you have? Characters who make a lot more sense... and an ancillary sibling-character who is suddenly hated for being a dirty perving dude who gets nosebleeds looking at all the people on the team they are supervising.
Gender equality much?
Furthermore, all of the characters are pretty much two dimensional, and never actually grow as people during this entire show. Nothing ever changes - they all exist in some weird sort of vacuum. Things happen, they move on, more things happen, they say some things, but they never really seem to grow as people. They just do the things the plot dictates they will do without ever taking the time to think about themselves.
Also, Haru tried to swim in an aquarium displayed at a store. I am never, EVER letting that one go.
This category gets a D+: The artistic direction for this show is fantastic, but unfortunately it comes at the sacrifice of actual character, and the theme is basically 'we like swimming swimming is fun and swimming with friends is fun'. Also the rampant homosexual overtones which never actually get acknowledged in the show, which also bothers me. Because if they were girls, then this behavior would make sense. But they aren't girls. They are boys. And boys do not act like this! Unless they are gay.
And clearly, they are not gay. Even though they totally are. By very definition of being girls trapped in a male's body.
I feel this show would have been greatly improved by the characters just suddenly making out or something to resolve all the rampant sexual tension littered all across the show because goddamn did you see the way Haru and Rei kept looking at each other? Seriously, what the f**k man. Straight men do not do that to one another.
Final Grade: C-
With all of that said and done, I come to the most controversial part of this entire entry. The final grade. Yes, it's a C-. But like with everything else, allow me to explain before you start flipping your tables or shaving your cats or whatever it is the Internet does when it wants to freak the f**k out.
This show set out to establish a franchise, which it has done incredibly well. It even does it by tapping a market that is, distressingly enough, incredibly large - that of the young women. We have so many shows that pander to the young men, with all of their ridiculous amounts of gratuitous fanservice all over the place, and while this show is, at its core, just one big marathon of fanservice, it's done in a manner which is incredibly tasteful, by virtue of using the excuse that this is a show about dudes swimming in a pool.
The animation and art in this show is, undoubtedly, completely beautiful. Detail where it should be, stylizations are used appropriately, great camera movements, good use of cuts, and most importantly they don't resort to stock footage ever. That is a monumental effort that shows the amount of love and dedication that went into this show.
However, because of this show's amazing popularity, it is going to start a trend that will plague the industry for a long time to come. All those shitty shows that target the young males with their big titties and flashy butts all shoved into your face? Make a show like that but targeted at women.
Yes, you're looking at an explosion of Yaoi shows folks. And I don't think anyone wants that.
But the worst thing about this show, the one absolute worst thing is that it never acknowledges that it is, in fact, a show so full of man-love it makes Hard Gay look like a straight dude out for a jog with his doberman.
Actually that's unfair. Because the actual worst part about this show are all the squandered opportunities to teach actual life lessons to the characters, allowing them to grow as individuals. To rise up above mediocrity, to become something legitimately amazing, instead of just a mindless show pandering to young people with horomones influencing the decisions they make in life. Like what shows to watch. Or what figurines to buy.
In the end, sex appeal and good animation are all this show has to offer. And if you're into that kind of thing, you're more than welcome to love and enjoy this show.
But I really just wish this show was more than that, because it had the potential to take the typical high school sports anime genre and turn it into something actually compelling. Instead, it doesn't seem to even care about wanting to realize that potential, instead squandering it because it wasn't part of its original aim at all from the start.
The funny thing is, that's almost exactly like Haru. So lazy, has tons of potential but doesn't want to realize it.
Just something to think about there.
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