Disaster Report: TRY KNIGHTS

You know, I've largely dedicated this column to document anime failures of the past but there are plenty of modern shows that are equally broken, thanks to the absolute glut of shows we get every season and the increasingly tenuous and untenable conditions under which they are made.  This is just one of them.

For the last decade, countless anime studios have been trying to create their own version of Free!.  That’s perfectly understandable, considering that series not only brought a lot of acclaim to Kyoto Animation but also made a LOT of merchandise money thanks to its fervent fujoshi audience.  This wasn’t the first time fujoshi turned a sports anime into a success – this has been a phenomenon in Japan since the days of Captain Tsubasa, repeated time and again with the likes of Slam Dunk and The Prince of Tennis.  The difference this time was international audience responded just as strongly, in defiance of the common knowledge within the industry that sports anime were doomed to fail.  Soon enough studios were shoving out their own stories of cute anime boys finding friendship (with maybe hints of more) and fulfilment through sports.  A handful of them found success on par with that of Free!, but most came and went with little notice.  Few of them could be said to have missed their goal as hard as 2019’s Try Knights.

Try Knights came about because Japan was chosen to host the Rugby World Cup in 2019.  It became a point of national pride when Japan’s own national team qualified to compete in that same competition.  Naturally, the national rugby union and its business partners were making plans years ahead of time for ways to promote the sport for profit, and part of that plan was creating their own little multimedia franchise.  They began by bringing in a BL mangaka to create some characters – in this case, Seven Days and Ten Count creator Rihito Takarai.  They brought in a no-name artist and a fledgling anime writer to create a manga for Monthly Comic Gene magazine in 2018.  This manga came and went in less than a year, but that didn’t matter because its true purpose was to serve as a springboard for an anime adaptation.  That adaptation would be announced in March of 2019 to begin that same summer, and it would be helmed by a studio familiar to connoisseurs of bad anime: Studio GONZO.

I’ve not discussed a Studio GONZO show in this column since Hellsing, and even then I’ve never really dug into the studio's turbulent history.  GONZO was founded back in 1992, but truly burst onto the scene in 2000 and spent most of that decade riding the anime bubble for all it was worth.  The studio pushed their founders’ creativity and their digital animation tools to the limit, producing memorable works such as Blue Submarine No. 6, Last Exile, and Gankutsuou.  As the decade went on, they became increasingly notorious within anime fandom for churning out pricey, mediocre shows that tended to drop off sharply in quality after the first few episodes before sputtering to an underwhelming conclusion.  They spread themselves thin not just with an ever-growing slate of anime but also by acquiring things like game companies and Korean studios, all while alienating most of the creative staff that had made them a success in the first place. 

To fund all their ambitions, GONZO put the company on the stock market.  This particular move would bite them in the ass hard during the 2008 recession, leaving them in the end with a deficit of over $30 million.  To save themselves from closure they sold off assets, laid off staff, restructured like a motherfucker, merged with a couple of corporate conglomerates, and got kicked off of the stock market anyway.  Over the next decade or so, GONZO’s anime output slowed to a crawl as the studio shifted its priorities towards supporting other animation studios.  That’s probably for the best, considering the shows they did take the lead on during the 2010s included such duds as Conception and previous Disaster Report subject Dog and Scissors.  It’s no surprise that they would sign on to something like this for a bit of cheap, easy money.  They wouldn’t do it alone, though.

GONZO would collaborate on Try Knights with another animation studio: Seven.  Haven’t heard of them?  That’s understandable, considering that when they’re not doing in-betweens they mostly made hentai.  Alas, the hentai market had collapsed back in the 2000s and it only became more unsustainable during the 2010s.  In recent years Seven started pivoting to non-pornographic anime, only to produce a steady stream of duds such as King’s Game, The Irresponsible Galaxy Tylor, the 2021 Battle Athletes reboot, and the second season of Peter Grill and the Philosopher’s Time.  Seven also brought with them director Tokihiro Sasaki.  He was an animator-turned-director who had worked with Seven on many of those aforementioned shows (along with Ojisan to Marshmallow, aka ‘that anime with Paul Blart.’). 

Combining the forces of two such studios did not bode well for Try Knights, and things wouldn’t improve as the show’s debut got closer.  While every other show in the summer of 2019 was launching their first episodes, Try Knights’ official social media accounts announced that the show would be delayed until the end of July.  This was as an ominous sign of a production that had fallen drastically behind schedule, even if few people took notice at the time.  As we’ll see, that nearly month-long delay would do little to fix the multitude of issues with Try Knights.

 

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  There’s this anime about a high school boy who really loves this particular sport.  Unfortunately he stopped playing due to a traumatic event – maybe an injury, maybe a bit of bullying, maybe both.  His love of the sport is renewed when he meets another boy whose temperament is the opposite of his but whose athletic talents compliment his own.  Together, they revitalize their school’s flagging team and win some sort of championship against more powerful, daunting competitors from other schools.

This is an accurate summary of the plot of Try Knights.  This is also an accurate summary of 90% of the other sports anime from the last decade because Try Knights has nary an original thought in its metaphorical head.  It can’t even claim any novelty from its focus on rugby because 2017’s All-Out! got to it first.  More specifically, Try Knights is about Riku.  He’s the son of a professional rugby player and is himself a promising star with a keen mind for tactics.  Alas, even after puberty kicks in he remains small and decidedly unbuff, a challenge in a sport that favors the tall and beefy.  For this unforgivable crime, he is bullied out of the sport by his own estranged older brother Reo after a knee injury, all while Reo constantly reminds him of how “there is no path for you going forward.”  Riku tries to fill the competitive gap for a while with chess, but finds himself pulled back into rugby by Akira Kamiya.  He’s a blond meathead on the school rugby team who doesn’t get this whole ‘strategy’ thing, preferring instead to just charge forward as hard as possible at all times.  He does like winning, though, and together he and Riku forge a bland and vaguely suggestive partnership.  There are other boys on the team but they are barely defined, do not matter in the long run, and are distinguishable only by their brightly colored anime hair and/or the occasional goofy-ass name.

While the team has an actual captain, Riku effectively becomes captain after the first episode.  It’s not just because he’s the only one who understands tactical play, but also because they’re all still bummed over losing their previous captain because he was a moron who kept playing on a bum knee during a tournament.  From there the story turns into your typical tournament arc as Riku and the rest square off against a team full of delinquents, one of Riku’s former chess rivals coming back to force sempai to notice him, and Reo’s undefeated and weirdly feudal rival team.  It ends precisely as you expect, with Riku and his teammates winning through The Power of Friendship™ as we flash forward to Riku, Akira and Reo walking stiffly onto the field as members of Japan’s 2019 rugby team.

A minimum of effort was put into the story of Try Knights, but somehow even less effort went into its animation.  I would normally not regard Rihito Takarai’s character designs as particularly complex or even all that original, but it’s clear that the animators at both GONZO and Seven struggled from beginning to end with keeping any of them on-model.  Akira and his artfully tousled hair seems to have proved especially challenging to the team.  I’d be hard-pressed to find a single shot in any of Try Knights’ twelve episodes where he didn’t look off somehow and that includes both the opening and the ending.  If not for the few scraps of promotion art made for this show, I’d wonder if model sheets for these characters existed in the first place.  It's a bad sign when an anime starts to give me flashbacks to Gakuen Handsome.

The animation of Try Knights moves as little as possible and what movement it can manage is stiff and unnatural.  This show struggles with everything from throwing balls to simple run cycles, a major problem in a sport full of fast running, ball-tossing, and powerful tackles.  Most of the matches consist of slideshows dressed up liberally with literal speed lines, set against backgrounds that wouldn’t pass muster in a C-tier visual novel.  Around Episode 3, there was an attempt to use CG models in some of the wider shots, not unlike those used for performances in idol anime.  The end result may be one of the most laughable failures in compositing I’ve ever seen and it’s clear that the staff noticed how bad it looked.  It’s very seldom used after that episode, and when they do they try to hide its awfulness by zooming out so far that the figures are little more than moving flyspecks.  It’s debatable whether this is better or worse than their effort to render props in CG, considering they look like they could have been ripped from a PS1 game.  I’ve seen a lot of bad animation as part of this column, but Try Knights might be the first time I’ve seen an anime without a single moment of competent animation.  This is not one of those anime that could have been fixed after its initial run for home video because the only way to fix it would have been to remake literally from its first concept.

It’s not like such effort would have served any purpose.  Since Japan’s real-world rugby team lost in the quarter-finals of that year’s Rugby World Cup, Try Knights quickly lost any use it ever had as a promotional tool.  It’s hard to find any public data on either its ratings or its disc sales, but I feel confident that it bombed at both.  There was a handful of official tie-in merchandise, much of sold through Good Smile, and I have to imagine much of it went straight to the clearance bins (if not the trash).  The anime was licensed for streaming by Crunchyroll and would get a bare-bones Blu-Ray from Sentai Filmworks, not that many people noticed.  That’s probably for the best, considering the few reviews the show did receive were far from flattering.  Caitlin Moore’s first impressions for Anime Feminist describes it as “thoroughly forgettable.”  Guardian Enzo’s first impression is even more indifferent, and the next time he referenced it he described it as “truly execrable.”  Geoff Thew of Mother’s Basement would put it in his Worst Anime of 2019 video, noting that it was almost so easy to mock as if the show itself were inviting the viewer to hit it.  The review you’re reading right now will probably be the most attention it will ever receive from anyone on the internet.

The makers of Try Knights learned the hardest way possible that when it comes to courting the international fujoshi audience quality does in fact matter.  You can dangle as many candy-colored, uniform-sporting anime pretty boys before them like so many jangling keys, but you can’t keep their collective attention (nor their money) for long without some genuine effort being put into the end product.  That effort can take different forms.  Sometimes it’s translating a mangaka’s passion for a sport and their elaborate, long-form character arcs to motion, as was the case with shows like Haikyuu! and Kuroko’s Basketball.  Sometimes it comes from a talented director putting their own unique stamp on a show.  Would those first two seasons of Free! or Sk8 the Infinity have made as much of an impression with audiences if Hiroko Utsumi didn’t used them to showcase her skill for exciting, kinetic action and her endless thirst for well-muscled torsos?  Sometimes it’s a bit of both, like that time that mangaka Mitsuru Kubo and director Sayo Yamamoto combined their interest in men’s figure skating into an original story that turned into the sensation that was Yuri on Ice.  

You could fairly argue that all of these shows were carried by amazing animation and appealing character designs, but it was the talent, passion, and hard work of the staff behind them that gave them life and touched the hearts and minds of fans across the world.  That effort and sincerity is ultimately what makes the difference between an international anime phenomenon and another forgettable seasonal show.  Try Knights is as far from that level of effort and sincerity as humanly possible.  It is a deeply cynical, hastily-made commercial for a sport that no one on staff gave the slightest of shits about, and audiences responded to that lack of care in kind.