The Beauty of Sport: Review of Battle Athletes Victory

Welcome back to OtakuNo videos, always, thank you very much for joining me, where today I'm talking about and I'm going to review Battle Athletes Victory. Now yes, I know you've never heard of it before, that's why I'm recording this review. I stumbled across it a long time ago, it was cheap, it looked cute, I thought heck I'll give it a try, and I was sucked in, I was very impressed. So this is an anime TV series released in 1997 in Japan, and released over here on DVD not long after. It's based on a futuristic sort of Olympics style game, competition game, for I think it's like a Genesis from what I found. Basic premise is it's about a bunch of teen girls who are all competing for the Cosmo Beauty title in the far future, which instead of being purely a beauty contest is mostly an athletics contest, in fact it really is an athletics contest. So basically it's a whole bunch of girls all competing in this huge range of athletic events. And the protagonist is this nervous and not very athletic daughter of the best Cosmo Beauty ever, highest scores ever, and so now she's entered and she has no self-confidence. The series overall is aimed definitely at the otaku market, I mean it's a bunch of pretty girls wearing swimsuits and leotards all the time. However the writers would go on to work on titles such as Read or Die, Gundam 00, and Trigun. So yeah, there's more to it here than just pretty faces. Now the overall world is ridiculous, but consistent. I mean it definitely takes advantage of the fact that it's set in the far future to have some technology that's a little silly, but always in support of the story. I mean 90s anime often had this thing where they weren't afraid to be silly, if it worked for a joke or if it just worked for the scene. But in this series they remain very consistent to that, so it's very, very careful in terms of the world. It is a very unusual world, and interestingly you really only see these girls in the competition and the training facilities and so forth. You almost never venture outside of that world. So you don't really know what the rest of the world is like, which I actually kind of appreciate. That this is the story, this is what we're talking about, so we're going to focus entirely on that. And moreover the story itself has basically zero fat. When it's trying to say something, it says it, and it focuses on characters, and story elements come in, and it just moves at a nice, brisk pace. Moreover it's almost entirely character driven. I mean it makes sense considering this kind of competition. And the competition can be silly at times, and some of the relationships can be a little over the top. But Battle Athletes Victory is about competition and sport. It's about striving for things against yourself and against other people, and what that really means. So the series spends a lot of time focusing on these characters, and showing you what they're like, and what they're struggling with, and why they're trying to compete, and all those sorts of things. Which is, I think, one of the reasons that it really sucked me in, is that there is depth to this series. Now the animation helps a lot. Excellent animation, especially considering the TV budgets at the time. A lot of frames of animation, and it's pretty darn lush. Now obviously some episodes are better than others, but I had no problems with it. It really, really looked good. Moreover, the characters stay mostly on model, although that starts to degrade in later episodes, but that's normal for shows of this time as well. The overall direction is pretty basic, pretty middle of the road, not exciting. It's fine, but a lot of just sort of normal shots, which again, okay. The editing, however, and the pacing is perfect. Jokes are thrown off very quickly, dramatic moments are given time and room to breathe, and to really sink in. And that's also enhanced by the voice acting. Both the English and Japanese dubs have voice actors who really get across what needs to get across. And that's tough, because these characters have to hit a lot of emotional range, a high emotional range, wide emotional range, I suppose, took a while to get there. They have to have despair, joy, excitement, frustration with themselves, anger at others, this whole melange of feelings during this very intense competition. So the fact that these actors are able to get that across very effectively, even starting in episode one, again, impressed me a lot. And this is also supported by a beautiful soundtrack. I actually tracked down and bought the original soundtrack CDs, because some of these tracks are just gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. A lot of lilting strings and horns for those really big parts, and instrumentation is right on where it needs to be, and it perfectly complements the emotions of the scene, which is, again, pretty darn impressive. So that's Battle At Least Victory. I hope you have enjoyed this review and gotten something out of it. If you want to watch it, please stop by StreamSuki.com, see if it's available out there for streaming. If you want to talk about cool anime like this, please stop by otakunovideo.net, where we have a forum, we talk about stuff like this. So thanks for joining us, hope to see you there, see you next time, with blood.