Reviews

You know what I love about sports anime? The way they make you want to get up dedicate your life to something as you're watching them (at least the really good ones do). "Cheer Danshi!!" does that. As I was watching it, I really found myself wanting to do EVERYTHING they were doing. I thought, "man, I want to learn how to do a handstand! I want to cartwheel!" I even felt like wanting to do planks!--which they do in order to gain that core strength they need for tumbling around everywhere and holding people up. Speaking of tumbling, that's probably the only thing I did NOT want to do because I knew I could never. Lol.

Aside from making me want to do stuff, this show is h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s. Like, laugh out loud hilarious. But wait. I have a confession.

I watched it English dubbed. (Gasp!)

So I can't speak for the original Japanese version of it. But about the way the English dialogue is written I'm 100% sure that the translations are not direct translations. They're very localized, and I say this because I'm pretty sure that Wataru didn't actually say that he has "white boy rhythm" in the Japanese dub (he really said that in the English version and I about cried laughing because of it). So, I think the localization worked in this anime's favor because it wouldn't have been anywhere near as funny as I had found it to be in English. With that being said, I recommend it be watched in English if you don't speak Japanese and English is your native language.

So humor is possibly its biggest strength. What follows would be the characters which really drive the story. The characters are very strong and distinct and I enjoyed seeing how they interacted with each other, how they had to work together as a team, and how they had to overcome their own obstacles. Each character had at least one sole obstacle they had to overcome. Unfortunately, this anime is overall very rushed, which really killed the character score. The reason is because all of a sudden, like a dozen characters popped up at once and I found myself completely overwhelmed. I'm sorry, but that is NEVER an okay thing to do--at least not in my book. No one appreciates it when you shove a million characters into the story all at once; it's confusing. It really started to feel disjointed once that happened, and I had trouble connecting with any of the newbies. halfway through, it just gets really messy which sucks because of how much I enjoyed the first half. I honestly wish they would've tried to split it into two seasons. I'm sure that would've have been better for the anime.

In all, it's a very enjoyable show that really rushed its way through at the end, but it was still enjoyable, it made me feel good, and it gave me lots of laughs.