What They Say:
Nanase Haruka loved to be in the water – loved swimming. In elementary school, Nanase Haruka, Tachibana Makoto, Matsuoka Rin, and Hazuki Nagisa attended the same swimming class together. Time passed, and as Haruka was living an uneventful high school life, he suddenly encountered Rin again. Rin challenged Haruka to a race and showed him how much stronger he had become. Soon enough, Makoto and Nagisa also rejoined the group, and along with a new classmate, Ryugazaki Rei, they established the Iwatobi High School Swimming Club.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While Free! didn’t knock it out of the park with its first episode, it definitely got me interested in it just from the visual perspective and having a group of friends with some interesting quirks. But largely it gave me a group of men with a passion, and that’s hard to find with a lot of school based shows these days as the cast tends to just stand or sit around and does nothing besides talk. While there’s a place for that, there’s something to be said about characters that have more to them than that and Free definitely made you interested in the four core personalities that we saw here and the way they interact, especially as some of them are realizing their period of being “special” is coming to a close and there’s only so much more time where they can do something really amazing.
That said, there are cute times to be had here just in watching Haruka sitting in the tub and lightly splashing water, because it is a human moment that many people do throughout their entire life. While the boys managed to not get into too much trouble with their late night swim competition, they’ve ruffled a few feathers but have also brought on the interest of Gou, who is trying to get closer to Haruka and the others, who in turn find that getting to know her better can bring them back into competition with Rin a bit more easily. With the boys doing their best to come up with the swim club and all that’s involved in it, the dynamic is definitely fun as Haruka envisions an easy paradise while others are a bit more serious about the work involved. Getting an advisor is harder though since their teacher is essentially bullied into it in a very cute way that also involves getting some designer swimsuits.
There’s some adorableness as they go through the usual kinds of montages here, including cleaning the in very rough shape pool while wearing their school uniforms, and figuring out what needs to be done. It is, at its core, great bonding material for them all and their advisor that helps to reaffirm who they are, as well as some of the cute ways others in the school get drawn into it. Those were some great club recruitment posters! While we go through this, we also get Gou going to her brothers school and finding out that things aren’t on the up and up with Rin and his involvement in the swim team, which sets off a few alarms for her, and which come back into play for the boys at Iwatobi as well. This all wraps around nicely with what happened when Haruka and Rin competed at night, and with what the boys are doing now during the day to repair the pool, and encourages Gou to get involved with the Iwatobi team because she can see it as a way of getting all of them to help with her brother. This is a nice way of making her more integral to the club while avoiding some of the more cloying aspects of it with her just lusting over one or all of them.
In Summary:
While the larger story doesn’t exactly progress here, we get a lot of good character material with the cast across the board, from the boys to Gou and to their newly acquired club advisor. Seeing the boys go through the process of repairing the pool is definitely fun, though you do wonder what the limits of it all in reality would be, definitely is a high point for the show because it allows them to focus their passions for a bit. But it also delves into the characters well too, from Haruka’s need to be in water to how Gou discovers what’s going on with her brother and trying to find a way to fix it by working with the new Iwatobi swim club. They accomplish a lot quickly, and it’s not entirely farfetched, but it works well and really sets the personal connection with it all as they’ve invested much of their time and efforts with it. The show continues to be fun and uplifting and one of the high points of my simulcast week.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
