Reviews

The first, obvious thing about this anime is the visual style. It reminded me heavily of Jinki:Extend and School Days, which I guess isn’t a very flattering-sounding comparison, but still. The characters are drawn with a bright, cute style, and the backgrounds are impressively detailed. The big thing here is the subtlety of the animation, which is extremely important considering the personality of one of the characters. There are many moments throughout the show where there will be just a tiny movement of a person’s head or mouth or hand, but will convey a lot of meaning and make the show that much more immersive. There was no lazy animation that I could see, and it felt a lot like the animators really put a lot of care into making this show. It may not look like Redline or Shakugan no Shana Final, but you can tell that the animators really wanted this anime to look good. Then on top of the great drawing and animation, there are the colors – OH MY GOD THE COLORS. The coloring is so incredibly bright and happy and bubbly, it’s almost like an assault on the retinae. Maybe some people don’t go for bright colors, but since I’m color blind, I love them and I think it made the show that much better looking.

The one thing I would fault Bamboo Blade’s visual department on is how they avoided animating the actual kendo scenes. Although the anime is about kendo, they usually make the matches very short, and with as little actual animation as they can. In some cases, they actually skipped the matches altogether, preferring, I suppose, to not waste time animating them. Near the end of the show this trend starts to cease, as more matches are properly animated (and damn did they look good), but for most of the show, it’s a rather annoying problem.

As weird as it may sound, I actually found a surprisingly strong similarity to K-On! for the first three-fourths of the anime. The main, obvious comparison is the moe, which both shows have in SPADES. However, whereas K-On! has girls who are extremely moe for the sake of moe, Bamboo Blade does a slightly different thing by actually designing properly interesting characters which also somehow have tons of moe as well. It’s weird, saying that the girls are both moe and strong literary characters, but it’s true. All five of the main girls are very deep, layered people with backstories, diverse character traits, and recognizable habits that make them feel pretty real. It’s extremely impressive when considering how lovable they are on top of that.

The other comparison I found was the storytelling style, which, for the majority of the show, is reminiscent of K-On!. Both shows have some kind of common factor that the story centers on – kendo in Bamboo Blade, music in K-On! – but the story doesn’t focus on that. Rather, it’s treated as a sort of medium through which stories about the characters are told instead. In both cases, it’s relaxing and fun to watch, with very little stress, which is something that I really enjoy. Around episode 23 or 24 is when Bamboo Blade turns away from that relaxed storytelling and introduces some actual drama. In those last few episodes, there was plenty angst and tension to be had, and then a very good ending that I really enjoyed. I won’t go into details, but just know that it won’t stay as laidback as the first 20+ episodes would have you believe.

In summary, Bamboo Blade was a really good anime that was lots of fun to watch. If you’re watching the show for moe, you’ll definitely like it. If you’re watching it for the sports focus, I wouldn’t be so sure. It may be “about” kendo, but in the end, it’s characters first; kendo second.