880https://i.ur.com/vI6Tm4u.jpg All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. If you close your eyes you can almost picture it. The time is early 2020. The place? An opulent office space somewhere in Tokyo the residence of a chief CEO. A real big shot. His suit and his coke habit mark him as a survivor of the 80s entertainment biz. Hes been places. Hes seen things. Hes helped stars rise and hes made them fall. Today is a day like any other when a representative pitching a new seriesan animestrides into his office. The rep talks smooth as Crisco and the boss doesnt need much convincing. His pitch is simple everyones got an idol show. Your company needs one too. The boss is hung up on only one point. Hes been around the block he knows his stuff and he knows that just blindly copying this hot new trend wont cut it. They need a twist. Idly he taps a remote on his desk and the jumbo flatscreen on the other wall lights up. Its a sports channel but theyre not broadcasting any of Japans typical national pastimes. Instead he sees an ice rink and a black puck zipping across it. He smiles at the serendipity as the rep stands there confused. Son. The boss says his tone cool and confident. Theres our twist. This is probably not how Pride of Orange a nearinstantly forgotten entry in the idol anime but also something else subgenre from late last year actually got greenlit. But it makes more sense to me than the alternative. Some washedup suit OKing this is the only way it seems plausible that it was made at all. Whats the other explanation? That this was focustested? That multiple people sat down and assured themselves that yes idols playing hockey is exactly what the youth of Japan want in their cartoons? If the show had actually been good its possible Id be sitting here praising the ingenuity of conjoining these two things that absolutely do not go together at all. But we dont live in a world where Pride of Orange is a good show so thats irrelevant. In the US this is the kind of thing that gets mocked on VH1 by washedup celebrities 20 years after it airs off the surreal premise alone. Some real Baywatch Nights shit. I dont know if they have a similar pop culture backwash hall of shame practice in Japan and if so whether it includes anime but Pride of Orange had better hope so on both counts because theres no way anyones remembering it otherwise. 880https://i.ur.com/3a5kdyR.jpg You might take all this to mean Pride of Orange is bad. Youd be right to. It is bad But every single bad anime Ive ever covered on Magic Planet Anime before has had a saving grace that Puraore does not they were bad in interesting ways. Pride of Orange is bad in the same way that Imagine Dragons ugly logos and directtoNetflix specials are bad. It is an obvious product of a pop cultural media machine completely failing to deliver the one thing that said machine should always be able to. In this case a baseline watchable cartoon. Beyond its ridiculous premise there just isnt much to it. Its audiovisual wallpaper. An active test of your patience that dares you with its sheer brainnumbing mundanity to blink first. This is animebyalgorithm a soinoffensiveitsoffensive patchwork of tropes plotlines and even character designs cribbed from other better anime kludged together by greysuited executives without a single creative bone in their bodies. Thats before we get to its more serious flaws mind you. So what is this horrible abomination unto mankind? Well as mentioned its theoretically an idol series where the idols are also a hockey team. In practice its more the other way around. The idol bit feels tackedon enough a grand total of two dance sequences with almost no buildup over its whole run that I wonder if it wasnt initially conceived as a straight sports series and then later altered. It does have the cast structure of an idol series at least and all characters present fall into broad archetypes that the genre popularized but quite unlike some personal favorites in it say 2011s The Idolmaster 2018s Zombie Land Saga or 2020s Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club none of them have much personality. Probably the best of the lot are Naomi and Riko whose distinction mostly comes from the fact that theyre quite obviously dating each other. Their brief arc which culminates in episode 9 is unquestionably the highlight of the series. 880https://i.ur.com/68kndm0.jpg The remainder of the cast is fairly anonymous including theoretical protagonist Manaka. 880https://i.ur.com/FlAFn5e.jpg We should also talk about Youko the teams coach. Youko is an outlier here because shes not devoid of personality like most other characters. Instead her combination of doofy catchphrases manipulative obnoxious personality and general overbearing nature combine to make her come across as weirdly creepy. In one of the shows arcs the term seems generous she attempts to recruit the star player of a rival team Yu whos recently left the life of a hockey prodigy behind to experience a normal teenagerhood. God knows we cant have that in our sports anime. In her efforts Youko resorts to tactics such as repeatedly incessantly calling her phone standing outside of her house and yelling and engineering a situation where she deliberately leaves a pen behind when invited into Yus house by her grandmother. This of course means that Yu has to return said pen Id argue she doesnt really but neither Yu herself nor her grandmother object to the idea. When Yu does so Youko ropes her into a bizarre bet which she loses and essentially forces her to join the team. This is glossed over with the nonexplanation that Yu actually enjoys being on the new team so it doesnt matter. Youko is similarly unpleasant to her other players and even engages in gaslighty emotional manipulation a few times giving her an almost predatory vibe. None of this is ever addressed because Pride of Orange has neither the writing chops necessary to address it nor the forethought to simply not make the coach a skeevy weirdo in the first place. I would also argue that Youko having to quite literally trick the cast into becoming an idol group on top of being a hockey team feels like it betrays a broad disdain both for the shows audience and its own genre. 880https://i.ur.com/yIacqLU.jpg But really while Youkos situation is the worst of the series many writing flaws its far from the only one. Frequent issues like conflicts springing up and then being almost immediately resolved or flashbacks grinding action scenes to a dead stop to repeat to us information we either already know or could easily infer recur repeatedly throughout. Pride of Orange often feels like the first draft of an anime that even were all these issues fixed would still be merely just below average. All these little problems add up and they make Pride of Orange an altogether miserable watching experience. One could try to chalk all this up to Puraores length but two of the anime I previously mentioned were also single cour. It is very possible with economical character building stylish animation sharp writing that builds a solid triumph narrative etc. to make your audience care about even a quite large cast in that amount of time. Pride of Orange never swings that because it has none of those things. It doesnt even manage to instill much of a base level thrill off the novelty of its premise the one thing that objectively distinguishes this series from any other. In October right around when Pride of Orange started airing a pilot short called SHAREDOL managed to do that much in less than three minutes. Length is no excuse. In the broadest sense the problem is this. The best anime can in the moment feel monumental. Ill again draw a comparison to The Idolmaster youll have to forgive my lack of experience with sports anime which would honestly be more appropriate here but the general structures still apply. One got the sense during the series climactic concert that those girls had done everything to earn their moment. They wouldve bled and died on that stage if thats what it took. It feels as its happening huge. Allimportant. Pride of Orange manages the almost impressive feat of going in the other direction. Of making not just its parent genres but its entire medium feel small trivial and trifling. While watching it I felt transmogrified into a disapproving stepmother fingerwagging at myself for watching these silly cartoons. And you can accuse me of projection and say that no anime no matter how bad should make me feel this way. But the fact of the matter is that taken together as a whole Pride of Oranges cheezwhiz take on the sports and idol anime genres improbably transforms simple boredom into existential dread. It is such a yawning void of mediocrity that its somehow one of the worst anime Ive ever seen. At the risk of repeating myself it is distinguished from past Magic Planet Anime worstof candidates like Speed Grapher Big Order The Day I Became a God and fellow idol trainwreck 22/7 by the fact that those anime were bad in a way that still made it clear that the people behind them cared about them. They may have had any number of very serious qualitative flaws. They may have been downright offensive at times. But a certain kind of terribleness can only come from misplaced passion which at least implies that there is passion. Let me be very clear this is not true of Pride of Orange. I do not get the sense that anyone who worked on this series cared about it at all. Whether because they did not want to or because circumstances made it so they could not I do not know but the few tiny pinpricks of light that poke throughNaomi and Rikos relationship the vanishingly brief pair of dance numbers that comprise the entirety of the shows idol element the surprisingly solid soundtrackmake it clear that for the vast majority of this show nobody involved gave a shit. It has all the artistry of a McDonalds order and ends with a limp nondescript hand gesture too lazy to be a middle finger. Make no mistake all of this is tragic. 880https://i.ur.com/fj1LI0D.jpg And perhaps the worst part is that I dont think Puroare is unique in this way. Things like Pride of Orange are what you get when a zeitgeist is about to die. Most of my time as an active anime enthusiast has been spent in the midst of the idol anime boom. I have liked a decent amount of those shows but I wouldnt quite call myself an idol anime fan. Those who would should be wary things like Puraore are not a good sign. The same is broadly true of the allfemale cast does stuff supergenre in general and for that matter anime on the whole. What else is there to say? Pride of Orange is symptomatic of an industry that is simply producing way way too much content by sheer volume. Few people watched it. Fewer of those who did will remember itfondly or otherwisein a few years time. It is hypergeneric but endlessly replaceable a combination ice skate / high heel stomping on all our faces forever. In this light the name of the protagonists team sounds less like a quirky sports team name and more like a sneered command. Dream monkeys. Dream hard. Because there has to be something better than this. 880https://i.ur.com/DbTuQAB.jpg Notes Disclaimers Usage of Anilists review feature does not constitute endorsement for Anilist as a platform the Anilist community or any individual member thereof or any of Anilists policies or rules. All views expressed are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons groups or organizations. All text is owned by me. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. This review has been reformatted and edited to comply with Anilists site guidelines.