Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’ve got an unusually timely article for you all, as I’ll be exploring a show that’s airing this very season: Bakuten!! (or Backflip!!), an anime-original production centered on a group of gymnasts. All anime-original productions tend to deserve at least a glance, for a variety of reasons. First off, productions that are designed from the ground up for animation unsurprisingly tend to lend themselves to animation quite well – issues of translating still manga panels or heavy exposition are irrelevant, as the narrative is designed for movement from the beginning. Additionally, in this current era of media mix productions, an original anime with less tie-in potential generally implies confidence, or even prestige; the production’s funders have faith that the work will sell itself, rather than selling the source material, and this faith is generally predicated on trusted key staff with a clear artistic vision. Lastly, anime-original works are generally written by professionally vetted writers, rather than folks riding the novice-to-published manga/light novel pipelines. This generally means the writing, characteristically anime’s weakest element, is at least of professional quality.
When you wrap all this together, it’s easy to see why anime-originals at least have the potential to shine, however their fortunes may turn. And for Backflip!!, we also have some impressively animated PVs to sort through, attesting to at least the first couple episodes’ visual splendor. My main concern going in is how well this show will be able to maintain animation quality in depicting such a visually demanding sport, but I suppose that’s a problem for the show itself to answer. Let’s check out the first episode of Backflip!!