Someone needs to give Rin a clue about his teeth. I feel like that’s a health condition.
- Get ready for a summer of
fun, excitement and fishing! I meanswimming! The power of friendship, a mysterious past, a few laughs and skinny dipping with your friends. In this first episode we meet Nanase Hakaru, a swimming star who doesn’t care about stats or figures, just “how the water feels.” In elementary school, Hakaru makes up one part of a swimming relay team with his friends Tachibana Makoto, Hazuki Nagisa and Rin Matsuoka. The boys split up after finding glory in the swimming pool and thus some of the mystery has been added to our story. They can’t tell us everything, that would be cheating.
I keep looking at this image…and I don’t know why. I think it’s his hair. Yup. That’s it.
- My Take: OK, let’s be honest with ourselves. This show is fabulous. The characters look fabulous, the rivalry between Rin and Haruka looks fabulous and the underwater scenes look fabulous. You know, if you were looking at that and not looking at Haruka swimming gracefully like a dolphin…who I wish was on my swim team in high school because none of the guys on my swim team looked like that. Ahem. I mean, what’s up with Rin’s teeth? Does it not bother anyone else that he has pointy razor-sharp teeth? That just seems like something you’d go get looked at right away.
See! See! I’m not crazy! He has pointy teeth!
- So you know, and I know that there’s a lot of fan service with this show. And you know what? I’m OK with that, for now. Usually, I like my “real life” based anime to have a bit less sex appeal and a bit more “kawaii” but I’m willing to open my horizons and try something new. I honestly think that they could go several interesting directions with this story and maintain depth with the characters they have laid out before us. And if all else fails, at least we’d have some awesome swimming matches to watch through the rest of the summer in beautiful HD anime glory.
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Aw! What happened between you two? You guys used to be buddies!
- Considering this show was hyped thanks to the rabid appetite of anime fans on Tumblr, I will admit to having lowered expectations about what I would encounter in the first episode. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the characters that have been introduced. This first episode not only grabbed my attention but got me rather curious about their past. We not only got a glimpse of this main group of characters as seventeen year old men (boys?) but also as their ten-year old selves, which I felt gave a great quick yet satisfying approach to who they were then and who they are right at this moment. Normally I feel like this kind of time skipping only gets in the way of the story but I feel like it worked really well in this case. We were able to understand Haruka and Rin’s previous friendship and what that meant to one another on a surface level through a few scenes. There were also glimpses of how their relationship and time together on the swim team as children shaped them as adults, which I’m sure they will to allude to more throughout the season. While this show is “swimming” (I couldn’t help myself) with cliques which are often seen in similar anime, it is clear there is something different about Free! and my interest has been enticed enough that I plan on sticking around until the end of season. At least until they go a whole episode without taking off their clothes. I mean, uh… The animation is so beautiful!