Ani x Para: Anata no Hero wa Dare desu ka

If I had to pick one phrase to describe my experience here it would be 'a pleasant surprise'.

I wasn't expecting too much from a collection of edutainment commercial shorts, and only really started to watch them because of the interesting assortment of musical artists supplying the ending themes. Furthermore, I can't say I knew much about the Paralympics, or any of the assorted franchises crossing over here such as Yowamushi Pedal, Dear Boys: Act 4, or KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops.

However, watching these gave me a newfound appreciation for basically everything involved. I won't say they're masterfully crafted -- a lot of them even follow ... the same basic flowcharts and incredibly sports shounen trope-y styles -- but I found myself getting invested nonetheless. There's simply something uplifting about the spirit carried in these shorts. The edutainment aspect also works well; I got to learn a lot about a lot of random Paralympic sports I'd never even thought about before (Vision-impaired judo? Goalball? Para-badminton?), and walked away with a newfound respect for the athletes in these fields. Additionally, a lot of the collaborators were cool -- as I mentioned before I was fairly unfamiliar with all of them -- and I now feel interested in checking out some of those stories someday as well.

The production was also fairly nice overall. The animation felt a bit lacking at points, but the varied artstyles mostly made up for it and helped each episode continually feel fresh and different. The music was also a pleasant mixed bag of styles, featuring some bigger name artists such as LiSA, Okamoto's, and Daichi Miura. A personal surprise favourite was Kaela Kimura's 'Wish upon a star'.

In terms of episode quality, my favourite was probably Episode 10, which purely focused on the dynamic between its' main characters and made them feel the most lively of the entire bunch. I liked the entire stretch of like, 7-11 a lot in general -- episode 8 was another soft spot for me because I thought the character dynamic there was also pretty adorable.

Overall, these were a pretty likeable watch, and I feel that they did exactly what they wanted to do. Honestly, I kinda feel like watching some of the Paralympics now (and I'm not even really a sports guy), so I think they did an excellent job there.