Fun cute girls doing cute things high school anime, except that it’s about hot guys
What They Say:
Free! Iwatobi Swim Club Season 1 contains episodes 1-12 of the anime directed by Hiroko Utsumi produced by Kyoto Animation.
After a run-in with former teammate Rin ends with bitter feelings and hurtful words, Haruka and his friends become determined to re-form the Iwatobi Swim Club. There’s just one problem – they’re missing a much-needed fourth member! With their eyes set on the athletic Rei, they’ve got to do what it takes to convince him to join so they can be in fighting form to face Rin’s new school, Samezuka Academy.
The Review:
Audio:
For this viewing, I listened to the English dub, which is offered in 5.1. The mix is clean, and there are some nice atmospheric effects in the surround channels, and left/right directionality in the sound effects, though dialogue stays mostly centered. The short movie OVAs in the special features also get English dubs, which is a welcome addition since those sorts of things are typically just subtitled.
Video:
The 1080p transfer for this title is bright with great range across the color spectrum. The water effects look particularly fantastic, as the animators obviously spent a lot of time getting them right, and the BD transfer shows that effort off very well. This is a really nice-looking release.
Packaging:
This release is pretty standard. The two discs are housed in a single BD case. The front cover has a collective picture of the five principal characters at the pool, while the back has the standard summary, technical details, and screen shots. The only odd thing is that the two discs have pictures of Nagisa and Rei. While the images are fine, it’s just interesting that those two characters are chosen and not Haruka and either Makoto or Rin.
Menu:
Really basic menus for this release, as they are more like something you’d expect on a DVD release. The main menu just has a static image of the main cast while some background music plays on about only a 10 send loop. While there is nothing specifically wrong with it, it’s not what we typically see on a BD release.
Extras:
Aside from the standard clean OP/ED, this release also has three five-ish minute OVAs that give quick snapshots of the characters at various points. Each OVA actually has two or three different quick stories that look at things like the Iwatobi crew’s recruitment efforts and a typical study day with Rin and his roommate, Nitori. They are quick and fun, and as noted above, I like that Funimation dubbed these too, as these sorts of things are just left subbed.
Haruka Nanase loves to swim. Considered to be one of the best swimmers in Iwatobi, Haru has not swum competitively in a few years. In middle-school, Haru and his friends Makoto, Nagisa, and Rin won a major relay competition, but when Rin moves to Australia to train for a hopeful Olympic career, Haru’s competitive spark dies. Makoto and Nagisa do what they can to try and reignite it, but their efforts are in vain.
When they get word that their old swim club is due to be torn down, they decide to visit it one last time and dig up the relay trophy they had buried there years earlier. Once there, they run into Rin, returned from Australia, and now openly antagonistic to the other three. But Rin’s reappearance is exactly what Haru needs to get his own drive going again. He agrees to join in with Makoto’s and Nagisa’s plan to restart the Iwatobi High School Swim Club, dormant for many years, because this way, perhaps he can swim with Rin once more.
The relationship between Haru and Rin is mostly what drives this series. Something happened between the two years earlier, something that neither is willing to discuss, but something that changed them both dramatically. And while they cannot understand what has happened to themselves, they understand the other even less, but it is in coming to that understanding of the other that they will be able to come to grips with their own hang-ups and figure out what they each need.
Haru is a great protagonist, as his idiosyncrasies inject some good humor into this, and the show does a good job of showing the balance between his desire to not care and his need to care. He is built up very well. That said, the antagonism of Rin is really what drives this series for me. From the moment he shows up, he calls Matsuoka and Nagisa losers and only has a singular drive to get Haru back in the pool and beat him in a race. And he does, twice, but neither victory gives him the satisfaction that he thinks he is looking for. He needs something else, something that only Haru can provide, but he is not sure what that is. What makes Rin so interesting is that from the start, while he obviously can’t let go of his need to be the bad guy, it’s obvious that he also misses his friends and the camaraderie that they used to have. Even as he is trying to push them away, he wants to pull them closer, and when he figures out exactly what it is that he wants and needs, everything else will fall into place.
Free! does a great job of balancing between humor and drama, and its strong characters really drive it forward. But what makes Free! so much fun to watch is that while it follows the script of every fanservice-y high school club moe anime ever, it flips the script and makes his about a bunch of hot guys being hot rather than cute girls doing cute things with every bit as much beefcake as the cheesecake the genre typically has. Aside from the story and the characters being strong, flipping the genders like this makes it feel fresh in a way the genre often doesn’t these days.
The only thing I can’t decide how I feel about with Free! is that I know there are more seasons than just this one, and while I plan to see them, this season ends on the perfect note, and I don’t know that revisiting these characters is necessary. I will look forward to it to a certain extent because I loved these characters, but I hope that the effect isn’t ruined.
In Summary:
Free! was a lot fun to watch. It’s every cute girls doing cute things anime you have ever seen, except that it’s about buff, sexy guys, and it has strong characters and plot to boot. It’s paced really well and comes to the perfect conclusion. I’m not sure how additional seasons will change my attitude on that, but at least taken on its own, it’s a great story. Highly recommended.
Features:
Special Features: OVA 1-3, Textless Opening & Closing Songs, and Trailers
Content Grade: A
Audio Grade: A
Video Grade: A
Packaging Grade: B
Menu Grade: C
Extras Grade: A
Released By: Funimation
Release Date: February 5, 2019
MSRP: $29.98
Running Time: 300 minutes
Video Encoding: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 16:9s
Review Equipment:
Magnavox 37MF337B 37” LCD HDTV, LG BP330 BluRay Player w/HDMI Connection, Durabrand HT3916 5.1 Surround Sound System
