Synopsis
Blue Thermal spins a youthful tale of a competitive college glider club whose members come of age through struggle, positivity and a pure love of flight. Tamaki Tsuru, a freshman at Aonagi University, was overzealous about volleyball when she was in high school. Following a romantic rejection due to being an athletic girl, she joined the tennis club in college to be less athletic. One day, she accidentally hits Daisuke with a tennis ball as he was transporting a glider, causing damage to it. Tamaki was charged with a repair cost of two million yen, but as she couldn’t pay the amount, she joins the sports association aviation club as a helper.
Review
I thought I would shed some light on this show. I’ve watch nearly 100 anime at the time of writing, and this is the first anime that I’ve watched in a theater. Likewise, I was quite skeptical about this show at first, as I was the only person in the whole theater, but this turns out to be quite a good show.
The story writing here is quite solid. Everything made good sense, and easy for me to follow along. There’s no major turn-offs whilst watching, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I feel like there are some bits that defies common sense, which confuses me a little. I’m usually quite into drama/romance genre, which I think that the writers had done a great job of portraying these elements into the film. The romance bits mostly doesn’t make much sense to me, but it didn’t bother me all that much as there’s only a handful of them throughout the show. In a nutshell, I think there’s some great elements of story writing throughout this show.
Contrasting to the story aspect, the art is a little disappointing. The character animation is quite great: their movements are natural and fluid. What I don’t understand is the background art. I think it’s very lazily done. Some shots from the sky looks like a Google Earth render for some reason? But at least the character art and animation is fine, so I’m not going to press anymore on that front.
There’s not a lot of soundtrack highlights throughout, but most of the uses of music are quite effective. The music in this show did a relatively good job of conveying the emotions of the characters. The ending was quite good… Not really much else to say.
Overall
I’ve pretty much enjoyed the whole show. It really caught my full attention throughout. I think this show is a little underrated, and I feel like it could do really well if it wasn’t for the poor advertisement for the show. I’ve never heard of this show until I was at the ticket booth. Give it a try everyone!
