Reviews

The only reason I kept up with this show on a week to week basis as it was airing was because the shows art-style had a certain nostalgic feeling to it, but I could never figure out why though. Going through most of the staff who worked on the character designs, art direction, and also the director just in case revealed very little to what I was feeling. I could see some semblance in some of their other works, but those are the ones I have yet to watch. While the ones I have watched from some of them look far different than this show. The closest comparison that I can think of is that it kind of looks kind of like Mamoru Hosoda’s work. I guess it’s mostly for the simple but appealing character designs, but it kind of can also be seen the background designs, color pallet, and the animation. I would even say that it has a very movie quality to it, but obviously downgraded enough so that it’s more suitable for tv. But outside of my nostalgia senses I would still consider the visuals to be overall good and appealing to everyone, the story on the other hand…

As in the synopsis, Stars Align starts off as a story about a new Student being recruited into the Soft Tennis Club. Soft being the keyword as there’s not much hard on attention placed on the sport compared to other shows with sports in them as well. The sport and the matches do take a considerable chunk of time from the show, but they are not the central focus. There’s no hot blooded matches, no intense rivalries, no amazing techniques(maybe strategies,but not that much), and no grand competitions. The highest stake that the sport has is that the club might close due to the student council not wishing to put a budget into a club that does very little. Even then it’s not much of a looming threat, and more so something that is stated a few times just to acknowledge that it’s still a thing.

What the show is more focused on is the personal and at times interpersonal circumstances that this group goes through. The most noticeable ones are the club members relationships with their parents. The two that are presented the earliest are of the main duo, Maki and Toma. Maki, the new student, lives with just his mother. As it turns out the father is abusive and extorts money from them via Maki when the mom is away at her job. On the other hand Toma, the leader of the tennis club has a strained relationship with his mother. This leads to Toma not believing he is as good as his brother, who also played tennis, and also leads him to have a sort of complex that leads to him having fits of anger. The other club members also have their own child-parental conflicts from controlling parents, passive aggressive parents, being adopted and so on. I would go into more detail with them but there isn’t much which leads to the core problem with the show.

This shows has an abundance of things it wants to do and has only so little time to do them. It wants to go into the lives of all the club members and what they’re going through, it also wants to focus on some non-club members as well, and it also wants to have some tennis matches have some sort of substance to them. This leads to the show only being able to not really go that far with any of them. It really touches the surface on almost all of the subjects that it brings up. The example I will bring up is the kid who becomes the manager for the club, forgot his name. The reason he becomes the manager is that he is gay and has a crush on Toma, and by being the manager he is able to support him. It’s obvious he won’t confess his feeling because Toma is seemingly not gay. Then it goes more into it by having the kid being maybe into cross-dressing and having a conversation with Maki about transgender-ism. Later on the Kids mother kind of finds out about him cross-dressing in a disapproving manner and that’s it. It never goes into depth with any of it which leads to much of it feeling vapid and forgettable, which in turn affects the characters in the same way.

I really do believe that this show had what it took to be a really good show. However it’s stopped by having a mean case of window dressing. You can see the components at play at many moments in the show, but they are also so far removed that they aren't able to play a crucial part in the big picture, and end up being redundant. At most, I thought this show would only be average at best, but at every turn more stuff was added to a show without resolving what was already there. With so much feeling underdeveloped, I can only think of this show as a sad disappointment.