A legacy still held up thirty years later.
What They Say:
A new generation steps up to the plate in a moving sequel to the 1985 baseball manga, Touch. Stepbrothers Touma and Souichirou are ace baseball players, and they may be Meisei High School’s best hope of returning to nationals.
The Review:
Audio:
The audio presentation for this release brings us the original Japanese language track in stereo along with the English dub in its 5.1 form encoded using the Dolby TrueHD lossless codec. The show is one that’s mostly dialogue-based with some exaggerated moments of that with a mild bit of “action-ish” material. So it’s a fairly straightforward kind of design that the encoding captures well. The forward soundstage has its moments of directionality from time to time and there are some amusing bits where placement and depth are useful, but for the most part it’s the kind of mix that’s not all that noticeable but is certainly serviceable and gets the job done without issue. We didn’t have any problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback as everything played through cleanly and clearly.
Video:
Originally airing in 2019, the transfer for this TV series is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.78:1 in 1080p using the AVC codec. The twelve episodes are spread across two discs in an eight/four format, giving it plenty of room as it’s a monolingual release. Animated by OLM, the show has a solid enough look as it captures the design and style of the source material itself which was definitely important as Mitsuru Adachi’s character designs have a particular look. The character animation gets more of the attention with some good design work and color quality that has some real pop along the way, but the transfer handles the locations and baseball scenes really well with a kind of “internal” consistency with other Adachi adaptations. The small moments of vibrancy are really nice and I definitely like how the character designs turned out as they’re fairly fluid when needed and have some good color quality and solidity to them.
Packaging:
The packaging for this release brings us a standard-sized Blu-ray case that holds the two against without a hinge inside. The first pressing comes with an o-card that replicates the case artwork but the design of the show and its color palette means that the o-card isn’t vastly richer or makes out better for its cardstock, which I find amusing. The two brothers look good here as they’re each in the midst of a throw from their respective positions and the layout of the episode count along the bottom is a nice little thematic touch. The back cover sets up a lot of in-theme elements where we get the field as the background and blocks showing off character artwork, a few very small shots from the show, and a breakdown of the extras and extremely thin summary of the premise. The rest is the usual in that it has a technical grid and a condensed and near-impossible to read set of production credits. With the case itself being the same and no show-related inserts included, the reverse side goes for the blue sky approach with some light clouds that on the left has the brothers pitching from a different angle as its artwork.
Menu:
The menu design for this release is simple but cute and effective as we get a small series of pieces from the show playing that highlight the location itself for the game with some cute upbeat music to help nudge it all along. It’s not the most eye-grabbing or energetic menus out there but it’s pretty effective for this show and largely sets the right tone. The layout is simple with the navigation along the bottom right as it uses some of the back cover design elements to block things out. It’s easy to use and in getting around for language setup and the extras themselves as it’s a fairly standard design for a Funimation release in this regard.
Extras:
The only extras that we get with the release is an audio commentary for one episode on the first disc and the clean versions of the opening and closing sequences.
Based on the manga of the same name from Mitsuru Adachi, Mix is sort of a sequel to their Touch manga from ages ago as it moves forward in time and has some of the same characters in it. The manga for this began in 2012 and has sixteen volumes to it and the anime adaptation looks to be well treated with Odahiro Watanabe directing it at OLM with scripts from Atsuhiro Tomioka.I had really enjoyed Adachi’s Cross Game series but haven’t seen Touch so this is a full-on fresh project for me. Considering it takes place thirty years after the other work that makes it easy to feel like it stands on its own, though those familiar with Touch will get a bit more out of some of the generational aspects of it.
The dream of Koshien is something that is familiar to anyone who watches any baseball anime at all as it’s almost always the goal. Meisei High got their thirty years ago thanks to Tatsuya and Kazuya Uesugi but it’s not been back there since. It takes a lot for a school to field a strong enough team to do so on a regular basis and those schools tend to be focused just on that. Meisei wasn’t focused on just that so it’s no surprise that it’s been forever since it’s been there. Seeing the 1986 champions at the start with some VHS-looking footage is great before it shifts into the present to introduce us to those that are going to make the attempt again. The difference in the visual design is enticing alone and reminds me why I like Adachi’s works since they’re well treated in anime form.
The show focuses on Touma and Souichiro Tachibana, stepbrothers after two widows married when the kids were about six years old and includes Otomi, a girl that’s a year younger than them. We initially see them together when they were little and getting along but the focus is on their middle school life at thirteen years of age. They’re what you’d expect of brothers that live in the same room in how they interact with each other and how they basically do give in when Otomi calls them out on things. It’s a quick look at their family life but one that I hope we get more of as Adachi is great at this kind of material alongside the sports aspect. Though having Otomi’s father have a bit of a fetish for her uniform is a quick strike against things because that is, again, just low-hanging fruit to play with and something I wish Adachi would just not bother with.
Baseball doesn’t factor too heavily into the opening episode which is about as I expected. We get a good handle on some of it with nods to the team that exists in the school but we also spend a lot of the first episode just getting to know the cast as it grows slowly with introductions while going through their normal start of school season. Tryouts and practice factors in nicely since you have those moving up through the high school side as well and you get a feel for this being a solid school for it overall, just one that couldn’t recapture the magic of ‘86. At this point it’s easy to not get too attached to the cast as they’re introduced simply because of the nature of tryouts. I actually liked watching the manager, Kuroyanagi, more than anything else with his kind of expressionless face and how he gets a handle on who is capable of what. When one student, Natsuno, steps up however, things start to perk up as he has some real talent. Enough so to even catch the eye of the high school pitcher. Which leads to the fun of how Kuroyanagi will begin to mold these kids in ways that they don’t quite understand.
The early episodes are fairly interesting in that it’s partially about biding time until certain older characters move on in the fall after their graduation and their focus falls elsewhere. When you have senior players on the team that aren’t putting in the effort and have connections it can be frustrating to the “young buck” players like the brothers here but they’re also smart enough to know that if they just wait a bit, get a bit more actual experience on the high school level under their belt, they’ll be able to move forward with a cleaner slate soon enough with no existing tensions to follow them. Like most of Adachi’s works, there are underlying emotions going through a lot of what’s happening but everyone keeps those emotions in check because of societal pressures and the like. And that may make things a little too smooth at times but it also fits well as something that’s more realistic than not. Knowing the talents of the two and how well they work together as a “Battery” while playing, they know they’ve got a potential for reaching back to what Meisei has gone through before and bringing it to the present as well. But they’re also restrained enough to not make it their central piece.
The show works through a lot of good baseball stuff as it progresses and spends several episodes with a practice game against one of the better teams – enough so that they use their actual starters to make it both clear and to try and see if there are any sparks of real talent within Meisei. There’s a lot going on with this and some fun little ties to the past when it comes to those that participated in the Koshien run thirty years prior as all things cycle around again. Having not seen Touch I’m sure some of it is lost on me at times but it works really well in that we get a lot of adults in this show making commentary, having their own issues and ownership of Meisei, so that it feels more layered and realistic like an actual high school sports team. So many focus just on the kids themselves and excludes anything non-related to the game that it loses a little something in that.
As much as I enjoy the baseball in all of this I really enjoy the character material. It’s not character drama because it’s just slice of life stuff, which is amusing when you have a blended marriage here and two stepbrothers who share the same birthday but are also pretty much near identical to begin with. Their dynamic with Otomi is great, we see relationship potential for both elsewhere as the show goes on, and they each have very different interactions in general as they go forward in their lives, both in the game and in general. Adachi has always written great characters and I was heavily invested in Cross Game because of that. I can see much the same here, just in a different way, and it made this opening set just an absolute delight to immerse myself in.
In Summary:
Though I don’t get the opportunity to watch a lot of sports anime, I love sports anime. There’s good and bad in it but Mitsuru Adachi’s works stand above because they don’t exclude the lives of these kids and how it impacts their game, which is something that I like but don’t always seek out. Mix is a very accessible show even with it being a sort of sequel to Touch as it exists in the same place but is telling its own story. I love the look of it as it brings Adachi’s designs to life wonderfully and you get a good feel for the world that it wants to inhabit and the kind of personalities that we get for the cast. It’s the kind of show I wish would run for the full length of the manga to tell its entire tale – and for Touch to get brought out proper as well. Funimation’s release here is solid, very enjoyable, and well-encoded and dubbed so that everyone can enjoy this journey. Very recommended..
Features:
Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Language, English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Language, English Subtitles, Audio Commentary, Clean Opening, Clean Closing
Content Grade: A-
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: B-
Released By: Sentai Filmworks
Release Date: March 3rd, 2020
MSRP: $64.98
Running Time: 300 Minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p AVC
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
