English Dub Review: Stars Align “Episode 1”

Overview

High schooler Maki Katsuragi moves back to his hometown and reconnects with his old friend, Toma Shinjo, who is trying to save the boy’s tennis club from being shut down. 

Our Take

When we first meet Maki Katsuragi, he’s the ideal high school boy protagonist. He’s the perfect son who helps out his single, divorced mother with everything, even preparing all of her meals. He’s also athletically talented, finding it faster to scale the eight flights of stairs to his apartment on foot, rather than taking the elevator. 

So when Maki moves back to his hometown and finds that the boy’s tennis club is at risk of being disbanded, his old childhood friend Toma Shinjo is the captain, and he gets convinced into joining, that’s when you’d think, “Well, it’s the high school sports drama again. This time, it’s tennis.” And if you thought that, you’d be kind of right. At first glance, this is definitely what you’d call a “sports drama.” But after watching the first episode, it seems it might be more like “come for the sports, stay for the drama.” 

Toma Shinjo, the stubborn captain of the failing boy’s tennis club, is nothing less than determined to save the club at any cost, even to what will probably end up being his detriment. Toma asks Maki to join, but Maki doesn’t want to, because he needs to spend all of his time taking care of the chores and his single mother. Not pleased with a simple rejection, Toma sends the team members on needlessly elaborate reconnaissance missions to scout out Maki’s everyday life so that he can find a way to coerce him into joining. Because that’s what real friends do. 

Toma discovers that Maki and his mom are barely scraping by together, and decides to just straight-up pay Maki like a day laborer to play in the tennis club. To his credit, Maki is above being manipulated by money and tells Toma to shove his cash back where it came from. But what Maki doesn’t seem to be above is the fact that Toma’s older brother, Ryoma, has encouraged Maki to join the tennis team, and decides to join and accept the money solely based on that.

Ryoma appears as though he’ll be one of the linchpins in the relationship between Maki, Toma, and the tennis club, as the two protagonists look up to him a great deal. Toma covets him as a tennis player and a successful person in general. On the other hand, Maki seems to admire him more as a kind older brother figure. 

In addition, Ryoma himself doesn’t look like he has a vested interest in how the tennis club fares. He just wants Toma and Maki to get along and play tennis together and doesn’t seem to acknowledge the actual intricacies of that relationship. 

The real source of conflict in this show, however, is inevitably going to be when the parents come in. 

For Toma, his mother is obviously very disapproving of him, though it doesn’t seem to be spelled out exactly why. When she finds out they’ll be the only ones home alone one night, she greatly laments it, referring to him as “that child,” calling him different in all the wrong ways. But they just talk about it for ten seconds, frame it in a skewed camera angle, and then move on. I imagine it’s something that will definitely be addressed later on, but it’s kind of odd to only give such a tiny glance at something so important, especially in contrast to how dramatically they show off Maki’s side of the coin.

Once Maki finally agrees to join the tennis club, Toma gladly hands him a racket, the credits start rolling, the theme song plays over the excitement, and it’s a quaint end to a hopeful beginning. But just before the episode ends, the credits pause and we see Maki making dinner when the doorbell rings. At the door is his dad, who barges right in, demands money from his son, beats the shit out of him, and steals the money. Maki, after his protests get met with violence, spends the rest of the exchange cowering in the corner like a helpless animal. 

Left with these very somber scenes, one questions how the tennis part of the show will come into play. Is the show going to actually be mostly about tennis, and the drama is just thrown in for spice? Is tennis just the convenient mantle that the interpersonal drama will sit upon? Will it be a crunchy blend of both? It seems the obvious question to ask, but I feel more compelled to ask it after seeing how they’ve visually treated the tennis so far.

The animation budget so far appears to be going mostly into the tennis sequences. It may not be the best litmus test right now, given that most first episodes tend to have a bigger budget overall than later episodes to draw in viewers, but you can tell they put a lot of attention into the movement of the characters. The character designs are somewhat unique, but simple, likely to alleviate the need to draw in a lot of detail during motion, which is where the animation shines most. The way characters physically move across the scene quickly and spiritedly is pleasing to the eyes, even outside the tennis scenes, such as when Maki is running up and down the stairs of his apartment building.

This gives me the impression that they want to put a lot of effort into showing off the athleticism of the characters, and that the tennis might not just take a back seat to what seems likely to be some pretty messy drama. This would be great because there’s not much value in slogging through an uninteresting drama, but some slick tennis action might be the spoonful of sugar you’d want.