Review for Free - Eternal Summer - Collector's Edition

Introduction

My first reaction when Free! Eternal Summer was announced for UK release was “What’s the point?” That question hasn’t strayed far from my mind, or indeed been answered in the intervening months, and now that the check discs are here, I’m just as perplexed. After all this is Season 2 of the swimming slice-of-life show, and the first season, Free! Iwatobi Swim Club remains conspicuously absent from our e-tailer shelves. Also, this isn’t a show where you can just dive in willy-nilly into the middle and get all the characters. The problem of course is licensing. Funimation licensed Season 2 and released it on DVD and Blu-ray, and courtesy of their working relationship, All the Anime get to release a Collector’s Edition in the UK. Season 1 on the other hand had its home video rights picked up by Crunchyroll, and in the US, they released the show on DVD through Diskotek Media. You’re going to need season 1 to understand season 2, so at the moment that means importing the DVD, or streaming the show (dub or sub) on Crunchyroll. However, the recent partnership between Funimation and Crunchyroll does offer a glimmer of hope for an eventual Blu-ray release of Season 1.


Free! Eternal Summer follows the fortunes of the Iwatobi Swim Club, as they face their second year as a relay team. Their members comprise Haruka Nanase, a single minded swimmer whose sole ambition is to swim ‘Free’, the steady Makoto Tachibana who swims backstroke, and the bubbly Nagisa Hazuki who swims breaststroke. The three have been together since childhood, but when they started high school, they were joined by former athlete Rei Ryugazaki, who strives for perfection, but can only swim butterfly. Their team manager is Gou Matsuoka, whose personal fetish for the perfectly toned and muscled male physique is fulfilled by the Swim Club. As children, the fourth member of the team was Rin Matsuoka, Gou’s brother, and he and Haru had a particular rivalry. He got an early chance to turn pro, but the attempt was less than successful, leaving him downhearted and on the verge of quitting. It was when he re-united with Haru in the first season that his love for the sport was rekindled, although he joined the rival Samezuka Academy with its stronger focus on swimming.


The second year is their final chance to make it to the nationals before the older members graduate from high school, and as well as their desire to win, they have to seriously consider their futures following graduation. The relay’s going to get a lot harder too, as Rin has been made club captain at Samezuka, and he’s putting together his own relay team.

The 13 episodes of Free! Eternal Summer, plus the OVA are presented across 2 Blu-rays from All the Anime.

Disc 1
1. Storm of Dive and Dash!
2. Stroke of Chance Encounter!
3. Butterfly of Farewell!
4. Somersault Turn of Promise!
5. Head-up of Decision!
6. Prime of Invincibility!
7. Crouching Start of Revenge!
8. Locomotive of Crisis!
9. Forming of Disruption!

Disc 2
10. Six-Beat of Tears!
11. Backstroke Turn of Fate!
12. Swim-Off in a Foreign Land!
13. Eternal Summer of Beginnings!
OVA. Forbidden All-Hard!

Picture

Free! Eternal Summer comes with a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on these Blu-ray discs, and at first glance it’s a nice transfer, clear and sharp throughout, with great detail, strong consistent colours, all working together to bring out KyoAni’s work to good effect. They’re masters of character animation, creating lush, and vivid worlds in shows like Haruhi Suzumiya, and K-On!, and they don’t deserve to be short-changed by a lacklustre transfer. The animators have had to take crash-courses in male anatomy to satisfy Gou’s fascination with muscles, and lean, well-toned males abound, with nary an ounce of stray fat on them. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that all isn’t perfect with Free. It is the eternal problem of digital banding, which here is more apparent than it has been for quite some time with all the HD anime I’ve reviewed. Any area where there’s shifting areas of gradual colour tends to break up into contour lines of stepped colour, and in Free, that’s usually the underwater sequences. In a show about swimming, that is a significant issue.

The images in this review were kindly supplied by All the Anime.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround English, and 2.0 Stereo Japanese, with translated subtitles and signs, locked during playback. My preference as always was for the original language track, and I was perfectly satisfied with the voice actor performances, maintaining continuity to the first season. The dialogue is clear throughout, the action sequences work well with the stereo, and the music suits the show. The subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos. I gave the English dub a quick try, and I could take it or leave it, especially the Australian accents in episode 12, which in the Japanese version are merely lifeless (you’d think they’d just dragged in some Aussie ex-pats off the street), while for the US dub, it seems that Funimation made their actors watch Crocodile Dundee before recording!

Extras

The discs present their content with animated menus. You can also watch the show in Marathon Play Mode, with the credit sequences edited out (why would you want to do that? Free! gets some good credit sequences!)

Disc 1 autoplays with a trailer for the original Full Metal Alchemist Blu-ray.

You get an audio commentary on episode 1 with ADR director and voice of Momotaro Ikushiba, Jerry Jewell, and lead writer and voice of Rei, J. Michael Tatum.


There’s another commentary on episode 7, again with Jerry Jewell, this time joined by Vic Mignogna (Rin), Josh Greele (Nitori), and Ian Sinclair (Sosuke). Frankly neither commentary is worth the time, offering the usual Funimation actor inanities.

Disc 2 autoplays with a trailer for Fairy Tail Part 18.

You get the Web Previews for the episodes, with a Play All option that runs to 5:24. These are in Japanese only.

You get the Extended End Card Collection (2:18) and Illustration Collection (2:46), presented as slideshows.

The Memorial Promo Video is a little montage catch-up of Season 1, running to 2:27, while there are further Promo Videos for Season 2 running to 2:41.

The textless credits... are on Youtube. Look them up. What you get on this disc are credit sequences with player locked lyric subtitles. Funimation. Go look up the definition of text in a dictionary and then get rid of the locked subtitles on these things. I’m especially peeved as the end credits to Season 2 are really quite special, and deserve to be seen clean.

You get the US trailer for the show, and further Funimation trailers for Hetalia: The Beautiful World, Kamisama Kiss, Black Butler, Inari Kon Kon, Noragami, Full Metal Panic!, Ping Pong The Animation, and One Piece.

I only saw the check discs for this release, and thus cannot comment on the packaging, the art cards, booklet, or the stickers that come with the Limited Edition Blu-ray.

Conclusion

I love K-On! Bear with me on this as there is a point. K-On! is pure, unadulterated fun, you have an after school club, a group of cute girls doing cute things, taking pure pleasure in friendship, all the while aiming to be a successful pop rock band. I love the characters, I love the story, the music, the antics they get up to, and I don’t think about the formula. And that’s the thing; there is a formula, one to get the viewer protectively adoring the characters without engendering any sexual feelings. Basically, the characters are written as infantile, they may be 15 to 17 years of age on screen, but they behave like 8-10 year olds, hence the cuteness. As I said, I don’t think about it when I watch K-On!, but Kyoto Animation have successfully applied the formula to other shows, like Chunibyo, and Tamako Market, and it’s easy to recognise.


I remember when Free was first posited; the formula applied to an anime aimed at a female audience for a change. Most everyone thought it was a joke, even when the first key visual of the four protagonists, muscles bulging out of their swimwear was released. But Free! Iwatobi Swim Club did just that, cute girls doing cute things, only these girls is guys. I am not the target audience for this show, which makes the formula so obvious to me that I even start to resent it. After all we have teenage boys, behaving like infant girls, all talking about their feelings and stuff (when we know full well that at that age, the teenage male vocabulary can be boiled down to a page of inarticulate grunts punctuated by a tantrum), generally being cute, wholesome, adorable, and acne free.


I actually enjoyed the first series of Free, and it’s a shame that it hasn’t been released in the UK, as the second series does build on the first and refer to it on occasion. It pretty much tells a complete story in and of itself, introducing the four main characters from Iwatobi, as they go about the motions of setting up their Swim Club, rehabilitating the school pool, recruiting members, getting an advisor and a coach, all the usual tropes that follow in such after school activity anime. The characters are interesting, the bright and bubbly Nagisa, the centred, motherly Makoto, the single-minded savant-like Haru, and the self-conscious Rei. Drama was introduced with the return of Rin, another great swimmer who used to swim with Makoto, Haru and Nagisa, but left to go to Australia. He signs up to a rival school, and that friendly rivalry between him and Haru carries the first season.


Just like Chunibyo, another KyoAni property, I didn’t think that Free! could warrant a second season, and with Eternal Summer, I do feel vindicated in that opinion. It’s very much a chance to squeeze some more profit from a successful venture, and doesn’t really bring much else to the table. Of course you could be justified in saying the same thing about K-On!’s second season, and you’d probably be right. The difference is the level of investment that you have in the characters, how much more time you want to spend with them, and in that regard, the traditional reviewer’s copout of ‘if you loved season 1, then you’ll love season 2’ is very appropriate here.

For someone like me that isn’t invested in the characters, Free! Eternal Summer feels like a rehash of season 1, some more time in the pool, some more cute, girly, beefcake antics, and more comic angst. While Haru and Rin settled things pretty much in season 1, the rivalry is renewed when Samezuka’s Swim Club also put together a relay team to compete against Iwatobi, and we also see the return of Sosuke, another sullen swimmer from the friends’ past, this time to cause Rin some angst at Samezuka. Things aren’t too hot at Iwatobi either, as graduation is looming for the third years, and that means the end of the Swim Club as we know it. And in the middle of all that, Haru loses his swimming mojo, requiring a last minute intervention from Rin.


I can’t help it, I am not the right audience for Free! I just see the KyoAni formula far too clearly in this show. There’s a scene in the final episode that sums it up for me. It’s the night before the Nationals, and the four go for a contemplative walk, which winds up as a conversational recap of the past two series. And then the reality that this is their last race as a high school team hits, the inevitability of graduation, and a girly cry ensues. All I can do is roll my eyes at the blatant manipulation. And then KyoAni win back my respect with the final race, which visually encapsulates what this series is about, in a way that those last ten pages of dialogue failed to do. The OVA, which I had never seen before, is a nice bit of fun too.


So when you look at the score I have given this show, please bear in mind that it’s not aimed at me. A cast of 16 and 17 year old boys behaving like eight year old girls is always going to brain-warp me out of appreciating this show. But if you can invest in these characters, if they do wind up as your avatars on anime forums, then Free! Eternal Summer is KyoAni doing what they do best, light character comedy drama animated to within an inch of its life. Free looks spectacular, and the scripts are put together with micro-metred precision. It’s a solid, entertaining show, and the only flaw is the absence of the superior first season.