Yaoi | Nefarious Reviews

Japanese Title: Yuri!!! on Ice

Similar: Free!

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Ping Pong the Animation

Watched in: Japanese & English

Genre: Sports

Length: 12 episodes

Positives:

Ice skating executed to 100%
Beautiful animation sometimes
Good comedy
That opening song

Negatives:

Too light on relationship drama
Not enough episodes for the content
Funnily enough, too much ice skating

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Yuri on Ice was a much-hyped anime at its time of airing in late 2016. I’m late to the party, as always, though I am free of the hype. Was it all style and no substance?

At its heart, Yuri on Ice is a love letter to ice-skating. This letter conveys itself through the perspective of Yuri, a Japanese ice skater on the verge of retirement. A secret recording of him performing a routine by world champion Victor goes viral, catching the eye of the champion himself. Victor drops everything to come to Japan and become Yuri’s coach, much to the surprise of the skating world. He promises to turn him into a champion! Meanwhile in Russia, another Yuri makes it his mission to defeat Japanese Yuri and get Victor’s coaching for himself.

If one has heard anything of Yuri on Ice, it would be the gay relationship and the animation. I’ll leave the animation for later. First, the relationship. It is nowhere near as big of a deal in the series as I was expecting after all that buzz. And I mean that in a negative way. The manner in which people swooned over it gave an impression of this being a gay romance first and a sports anime second.

The reverse is true.

The relationship remains present throughout the 12-episode run yet feels set in the background for the most part. There is a distinct lack of drama, tension, and stakes. For instance, Victor is so successful and has such pull that he can do whatever he wants. Nothing puts a limiter on his time with Yuri, such as a prior commitment or family obligation that only gives him three months to make Yuri successful. If Yuri doesn’t show progress, Victor has to leave. You know, anything similar to that. The other angle they could take is Victor’s personality. He is the sort to do whatever he wants, change his mind on a whim – his decision to drop everything and move to Japan to train Yuri took seconds to make. I expected conflict would arise once the “honeymoon” period of his new coaching job faded and he looked for another distraction. I want something like Major, where the relationship has to go through hurdles, make sacrifices for the career, and take the foreground where needed. The pressure on Yuri to succeed before retirement carries the drama like that one guy who does all the work on a team project.

Their relationship is fine but uninteresting. If this were a straight couple, no one would care. That said, at least it commits to the relationship. No yaoi bait here. I like these characters and I want to see more of them as people rather than sportsmen.

Yuri on Ice instead focuses on the ice-skating. Expect a lot of ice-skating for a 12-episode season. Almost every performance plays in full, not matter how unimportant the competitor. Don’t get me wrong, the performances are great, bursting with love and passion for the sport. The studio hired a professional skater to choreograph and record each individual routine even if repeated, as the sound of the skates on ice differs every time. Different venues affect sound as well. The passion is undeniable. You just don’t need to show all of them from start to finish when much of that screen time needs to go to character development instead.

Yuri and Victor already don’t have enough personal story; now imagine the competitors. The tournaments introduce a dozen or so skaters from around the world. We know almost nothing about them until it’s their turn to perform, which dumps an entire life story in minutes along with the full performance. Once the sequence is over, they retreat to the background until their next turn. Only Russian Yuri has even close to the screen time he deserves.

The sport aspect is important for a sports anime – goes without saying. However, characters matter more. Great characters can make any sport engaging. The mark of a great competitive story is the ability to make me cheer for the opposition. When I don’t want either side to lose, you have me. It’s hard to care for competitors’ performances when we know little about them. In any other sports anime, they would be part of the core that makes the competitions more engaging through drama, rematches, backstory, and their past or future ties to the protagonist. This is especially notable when their performance score is lower than Yuri’s score. Why did you show their full performance if they didn’t matter?

This leads to another problem. The series does a poor job of explaining to the ice-skating uninitiated how scoring works. It tells us that harder moves are worth more points. Yes, that is obvious. What’s the difference though? How much more valuable is a quadruple toe loop than a triple? Is it more points to go for a quad loop with an imperfect landing or a perfect triple? There are times when one person does more mistakes than another yet earns a higher score. I’m sure it’s all valid, as it would be in a real competition. Just tell me how it works!

Before I conclude on a positive note, let me address a final negative. The animation is a mix of excellent and average. The first few routines and the OP are especially beautiful, but the quality drops as we progress until it picks up again towards the end. Studio MAAPA did touch up the animation post-release, so the most egregious scenes are fixed. The final version is never bad, though of course it would have been great to maintain top quality throughout. If only there was a way to cut down the number of sequences that needed such elaborate animation…

Yuri on Ice went by in two easy binge sessions (and I never skipped the OP). The likeable characters wrapped in good humour that isn’t copied from a template makes it a joy to watch.

Overall Quality – Medium

Recommendation: Try it. Yuri on Ice is an easy one to recommend though whether you will stick with it varies on how much ice-skating you want to see.

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Awards: (hover over each award to see descriptions; click award for more recipients)

Positive:

Negative: None

Japanese Title: No. 6

Similar: Ergo Proxy

Psycho-Pass

Towards the Terra

Banana Fish

Watched in: Japanese

Genre: Action Drama Mystery Science Fiction

Length: 11 episodes

Positives:

Quality art and animation.
Good start.

Negatives:

Wheel spinning second act.
Protagonists lack involvement.
Mismatched music.

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In an odd coincidence, I have completed three anime that open with a similar premise – Toward the Terra, Xam’d: Lost Memories, and No.6. They are each about a late teen living a good life, free of worries, when an outsider tells him it’s all a lie and his life turns upside down.

In No.6, Shion lives in the sixth of humanity’s utopian cities. Everything is perfect – no poverty, no crime, no conflict. He was one of the city’s elite residents with every luxury paid for in exchange for contributing to society in an area of expertise – ecology, in Shion’s case. He lost all such privileges at 12 years old when he helped one of society’s rejects take shelter. Years later, he now oversee No.6’s trash bots.

When a disease hits the city that causes rapid aging, the authorities arrest Shion. Of course, he’s as clueless as the rest, but he dared question The Man and for that, he must die. However, the same boy from all those years back who goes by the name Nezumi, meaning “rat”, scurries to the rescue and breaks him free of society’s shackles. The adventure begins.

I love this type of opening that upends the protagonist’s world. It raises so many questions at once, generating immense conflict for the protagonist torn between the world they once knew and the new reality, and I can’t want to see it all unravel. How did society erect the façade in the first place? How does it control the populace? Why? What’s the protagonist’s involvement in its history (there is always something)? How have the Outsiders survived all this time?

…

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

No.6 doesn’t make an effort in any of these questions.

Damn. What a shame.

Once out of the city, marking the end of act 1, the plot just stalls like a novice driver confusing the clutch and accelerator pedals. Each episode of act 2 goes as follows: Nezumi saying he hates the city, Shion asking why, Nezumi saying he’ll tell him later, and repeat. Characters don’t take action. There are minor moments – just not enough to drive the plot forward.

The next real event is at the end of act 2, leading into act 3. It’s as though the writer set in stone that “When the characters meet this guy over here, act 3 starts.” She refused to bring this event forward and come up with something else to start act 3 when act 2 had nothing going on (or write new events to lift the drought). I see this occur a lot in Korean dramas. The studio mandates a certain number of episodes to fill the TV schedule – usually 16 1-hour episodes, yet their romantic comedies are rarely complex enough to fill 16 hours. Acts 1 and 3 have stricter lengths in a story than 2 does. A slow first act turns the audience off and they won’t return. A slow third act leaves a bad aftertaste. Therefore, the filler slumps into the second act (“will they, won’t they,” and “problem of the episode” scenarios).

Unlike those drawn out K-dramas, a fictional world with a grand conflict like No. 6 has plenty of material to tap into. Why didn’t we explore more of the city and its utopian society? The idea of each citizen focused on one specialty with everything paid for isn’t relevant after the opening. This world has but a fraction of Psycho-Pass’s depth.

Act 2 instead focuses on the main couple, which doesn’t work either. There is too much focus on Shion and Nezumi’s relationship, yet not enough because it doesn’t move anywhere during this middle section. Again, I suspect the writer refused to allow their development to progress, “Keeping the good bits for the end.” The one positive I can say about their relationship is that it isn’t a shounen ai tease. It commits.

Even when the plot does get off the recliner, our protagonists aren’t driving agents to lead the story. Their allies do more work than they do in resolving the grand conflict. It feels as if the writer had an idea for a couple but no story to accompany them, and an idea of a story but no characters to lead it. Since they were lacking each other in the technical sense, she brought them together like the final two pieces of a puzzle. She didn’t realise they weren’t meant for the same puzzle. At least not without further work.

None of the backstory mysteries involving Shion’s mother, the city’s origin, and the rebels amount to anything meaningful. The writer knew mysteries should be there to entice the audience, but didn’t go back to flesh them out and tie them to the plot in a meaningful way.

You can look to several other anime for this idea executed expertly. Start with Psycho-Pass. No. 6 isn’t a terrible anime. Though when others have already shown you how to do it right, it’s difficult not see all the problems despite any positives.

Art – High

No. 6’s strongest quality is the art, particularly the animation. Episode 9 has a Ghibli quality scene. I also like the visual contrast between the clean city and dirty slums.

Sound – Medium

The acting is good and most music works well. The OP and ED songs have no life in them and sound so weird. I’m unsure of what they are trying to convey in relation to the narrative.

Story – Low

A boy has his utopian life upended when he helps an outsider, who later helps him escape the authorities in return. A good start isn’t enough to keep one going to through a stalled second act and poorly fleshed out finale.

Overall Quality – Low

Recommendation: Skip it. With the likes of Psycho-Pass, RahXephon, and Towards the Terra, to name a few, using the same setup to greater results, there is little reason to knock at No. 6.

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Awards: (hover over each award to see descriptions; click award for more recipients)

Positive: None

Negative: None