Six girls from different schools and backgrounds come together to do cheerleading and make videos. It should be relatively simple to make a series about this, but why does Na Nare Hana Nare feel so disappointing? Even when it ended with such a great performance?
Way back in the first episode we met Kanata, who is in her high school’s cheerleading club but sidelined because of some issue and her friend Megumi, who also did cheerleading in middle school but who got ill and had to stop while she recovered and went through rehabilitation. Her other friend is Shion, from a very posh school, famed for her gymnastic ability. Shion is classmates with the fourth girl, Suzuha, a small, silent girl who parkours her way to school every day. Chasing her is how Kanata meets Anna, half Brazilian and aspiring Youtuber and her friend Nodoka, a yoga enthusiast. Anna wants to feature Suzuha in her Youtube channel; Suzuha doesn’t want. Some hijinks and misunderstandings later and by the second episode we got our cheerleading group.
From there on you expect to see the story revolve around these girls with their different backgrounds and abilities to learn to do cheer together, while they’re also looking for opportunities to actually perform, both to cheer up people and to help Anna grow her channel. Interspersed with that there should also be episodes in which each of the girls gets a bit of the spotlight, in typical (school) club anime style. Plenty material in this to fill a series, if that what it wants to do. Unfortunately it’s not the only thing Na Nare Hana Nare wants to do.
The other approach this series could’ve taken, the approach it seems to settle on at first, is to treat it as a serious sports anime. After all, we start off with Kanata and her school cheerleading team at a regional competition, in which an accident happens during their routine. An accident that was so serious that it stopped Kanata from participating anymore. Not because she was hurt herself, or because like Megumi she was physically incabable, but for purely psychological reasons, suffering from something similar to what Simone Biles suffered from in real life. Lacking the confidence to keep doing cheer, Kanata is aimless; her encounter with Suzuha and Anna int hat first episode gives her a bit of her confidence back. Na Nare Hana Nare therefore could be the story of how Kanata regained her confidence and came back to competitive cheerleading. This could be contrasted with how Megumi is struggling with her purely physical rehabilitation and as well with how her cheer club mates will respond to seeing her do cheerleading, but not for them.
Slice of life focused story on how cheerleading can lift up the spirits of your neighbourhood and town, a very P.A. Works sort of thing, or a sports orientated show about coming back from psychological and physical setbacks. Both are interesting and could’ve led to a good series. The problem was that Na Nare Hana Nare didn’t want to choose either approach and therefore half assed both, giving short shift to either.
Honestly, this mixture could have worked, but not in a one cour, twelve episode series. With a main cast of six girls and four or five more supporting characters drawn from the school cheerlead club, there are too many people to give everybody the attention they need. Because of the need to keep both storylines going and little room to stuff them in, plot points from one get dropped when the focus is on the other, most noticably seen in episodes 4-5, which is all about Anna trying to save her beloved local records shop, her second home, from closing through the power of cheerleading and Youtube. Not only cuts that short Kanata’s entire story when it just started, the resolution to it had little to do with what the girls themselves did. It all felt messy and rushed. Had this been a two cour show, with twentyfour episodes, there would have been room for an A and a B-plot in each episodes, swapping focus when necessary but still keeping the other story going. There would’ve been more room to get to know all the characters, when now Nodoka e.g. barely got any attention.
It would have also meant that the whole plot revolving around Kanata, her fears and what exactly happened during that incident, what that incident meant for the confidence of the team as a whole could have been better handled. Because now it was confusing to understand even what happened. Plenty of people thought e.g. that it was this incident that led to Megumi getting hurt to the point of needing a wheelchair, rather than having been ill and requiring surgery for it.
Episode by episode this was a decent show still; the quality of animation and character acting was what you’d expect from P.A. Works, but as a whole this was a failure.
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