Hoshiai no Sora Review – 60/100

It’s often said that sports anime aren’t really about sports, but about the characters who play them. Not every show in the genre is so dedicated to its cast as to deserve such an assessment, but series like Cross Game, Ping Pong, and this year’s Run With the Wind prove that sometimes it holds true. At the beginning of the fall 2019 season, Hoshiai no Sora looked as though it would join their ranks as a sports anime that put people first and athletics second. Unfortunately, it ended up prioritizing not its characters themselves, but the creation of uniformly damaging family lives for nearly a dozen middle school kids. What’s worse, these difficult situations were often introduced in a given episode, only to disappear for weeks at a time, and in some cases never to be revisited. And when the show finally began to focus on tennis near the end of its run, it paced itself far too quickly, resulting in a wholly unsatisfying finish. Were I to describe Hoshiai no Sora in three words, I’d go with overstuffed, unfocused, and inconclusive.

How did a series with such promise experience such a precipitous drop-off over the course of twelve weeks? To find the answer, you first need to understand the cause for optimism that stemmed from its first two episodes. Hoshiai no Sora established clear voices not only for its central tennis duo of Maki and Toma, but also for its many supporting players, and it managed both tasks very quickly. Their unique posture, speech patterns, and relationships with each other made them easy to accept as living, breathing people. The show set about creating an entire middle school ecosystem for itself as early as episode two, and it used both friendship and enmity to do it. Hoshiai didn’t shy away from darkness, either – its premiere famously ended on a scene of domestic violence, and Toma’s fractured relationship with his mother was an intriguing question mark during the series’ early chapters.

The show set about bringing its teenage tennis club members closer together, which it did fairly well, but it sometimes used personal or familial trauma in order to make it happen. One boy’s mother poured boiling water on his back when he was a baby, leaving a shameful scar that prohibited him from sharing a locker room with the other guys. The team’s acceptance of his past was touching, at least in my view, but not every such story was a success. Another of the boys turned out to be a pathological liar as a result of his mother’s demanding attitude, a bombshell which was handled with all the subtlety of an 80s after school special. Nearly all of the kids had abusive, controlling, or disapproving parents, which became less tragic and more improbable every time the show went back to that well. Many of these sad circumstances were put on display just once or twice before disappearing without a proper resolution.

They may have disappeared, but they weren’t abandoned. Hoshiai no Sora was originally conceived as a 24 episode series, and had already been in production for two years when the order was reduced to 12. Director Kazuki Akane opted not to restructure the show and just deliver the first half, and seeing as he created the original story, it’s impossible to blame him for that decision. Unfortunately, it meant that the summer tennis tournament (on which the future of the team was riding) was compacted, and ultimately robbed of proper narrative weight. It couldn’t hold up to the show’s early visual excellence, either, reusing a great number of cuts in the style of something like Aim for the Ace, some of which didn’t logically follow one another. The final episode, after concluding the tournament, jacked up the stakes within the last five minutes, then cut to black – leaving the main characters’ arcs in highly dramatic, anticlimactic positions.

There’s a chance that we’ll get more Hoshiai no Sora in the future, as Akane has vowed to conclude the series in some form. It might not be animated, however, and that’s a shame, since the show’s animation was excellent in many spots. When the show began, its kinetic motion and beautiful follow-through on racket strokes frequently wowed me. A pair of episodes near the middle of the story, which featured a practice match against a rival school, made clever use of 3D backgrounds to depict long volleys in great detail. Many of the issues tackled by the show were impressive, too, including artist appreciation (or lack thereof), gender identity, and adoption. But in trying to incorporate all these themes, plus a host of dysfunctional family dramas and an underdog tennis story, the series stretched itself too thin, and failed to make good on the promise of its earliest episodes. Time will tell whether Hoshiai no Sora will be forgotten entirely or remembered for the circumstances of its production; either way, it failed to leave a mark on its own terms.