Sentai Filmworks has re-issued their out-of-print blu-ray release of Taisho Baseball Girls with new cover art just in time for baseball season. Batter up!
The year is 1925 and Japan is in the midst of change. Women are on the verge of asserting themselves more in a culture that has historically viewed them as subservient to men. In an era where baseball is still a relatively new sport and sailor suits are just starting to replace traditional kimonos as school uniforms of choice, a high school baseball player makes the mistake of telling a female student Akiko that women aren’t cut out for baseball and that they should just be housewives. This infuriates Akiko and causes her and fellow student Koume to form their own all-girl baseball team to show the guys how wrong they are. Over the course of the series, we are treated to the girls’ struggles as they strive to get better and better, slowly improving themselves both physically and emotionally and growing together as a team. Can they prove to the boys that they can play baseball with the best of them?
While in many ways Taisho Baseball Girls is structured like a pretty standard sports anime complete with training montages, close calls and “the big game”, the period setting and message of female empowerment does help set it apart and make it feel a little more fresh that it might otherwise. While a couple of the girls on the team get short-changed in the character development department, for the most part you really do grow fond of these plucky upstarts and enjoy watching their journey, as predictable as it may be. Actually the biggest downside to this show is that it feels constricted by budget at times. The animation has a very low framerate in places, and it’s obvious that the studio (J.C. Staff) saved most of the budget for the actual baseball game scenes. While this isn’t a dealbreaker, it still bears mentioning. Also some of the characters are definitely stereotypes (the tomboy, the nerd, the quiet one, the gentle cute one, the stern, standoff-ish one, etc.), but as I said before I think the show does a pretty good job of actually rounding out their personalities a little more beyond their basic traits, especially in the case of Koume and Akiko.
The video is a little of a mixed bag with some scenes coming across overly soft and in a couple of instances even blurry and out of focus. I would guess that this is more an issue with the source than the transfer though. But it’s something that still bears mentioning. The Japanese audio (with included English subtitles) is the standard clean 2.0 mix that doesn’t wow but gets the job done, and as standard for a less popular show from Sentai, no English dub is to be found here. Extras are the usual clean opening and ending animations with one addition. At the beginning of the first episode, we are treating to a quaint little song by Koume to serve as a kind of introduction to the era. As a text-only bonus called Tokyo Bushi, the disc basically provides footnotes giving additional historical context into the various elements of the backdrop of the song. I just wish that these notes had been included as an actual subtitle track that could be read during the song itself.
In conclusion, this 12-episode series, while hardly groundbreaking (unlike the all-girl baseball team in the show), is still a pretty fun and entertaining time with a nice little element of period detail to help it standout from other countless sports anime.