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This Week in Anime
Is Water Polo Anime RE-MAIN Worth Watching?

by Steve Jones & Jean-Karlo Lemus,

This MAPPA-animated series follows the typical sports series formula with an added mix of amnesia thrown in. Is there anything unique about its Speedo-wearing cast?

This series is streaming on FUNimation

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Jean-Karlo
Steve, I know people call them "The Dog-Days of Summer" and hate the heat, but I'm none too happy about the seasons changing. I like summer. And I thought people liked sleeping, heat makes that so easy...
Steve
I just had the very sad realization that, even if I were stuck in a coma that long, it probably still wouldn't dent the amount of sleep debt I've accrued over my life. But we're not here to discuss my caffeine dependence. We're here to talk about water polo. And crayon drawings.
Coming to us straight from Bandai Visual, because truly they know Anime Fan Wants™! Because goodness knows, amnesias playinh Water Polo was a niche I desperately wanted filled!

... But really, the show we're talking about this week is RE-MAIN, and it's actually a delight, talk about a great show for the season.
I mean it is a very odd duck just based on that core premise alone. I admit I've never really thought about water polo much, but six episodes of this has convinced me that it's gotta be one of the strangest team sports out there. And, apparently not confident enough in that hook alone, RE-MAIN spices itself up with an amnesiac former polo prodigy protagonist, who has lost all memory of and aptitude for playing. That's a lot!
:musical_note: "I work out" :musical_note: This makes for a unique framing device for the show. Protagonist Minato was almost nationally-renowned for his skill at water polo. But a car crash leaves him comatose for half a year, and costs him the past three years of his memory. When the show begins, Minato knows as much about water polo as the average viewer would—to say nothing of being about as good at playing it.
And in that regard, it's okay as a framing device, but it jives weirdly with the tone of the rest of the show. Like, there are moments in the premiere that suggest a melodramatic road to recovery. At one point, Minato wrestles with the fact that his sister still has night terrors about the accident, while his amnesia, as bad as it is, frees him from that particular burden. That's heavy stuff!

Yet it kinda belies the fact that the meat of the show is about seven boys who share a single brain cell, and their mad dash to slap together a functioning aquatic soccer team.
Honestly, you could have built this show upon the back of Minato's rehabilitation alone. Something like Takehiko Inoue's Real, maybe. Instead, we get the inspiring-but-deflating montage of Minato rushing through his rehab therapy and crunching for high school entrance exams over a period of months, and... that's it.

Yeah, when I heard about the premise of the show, that's pretty much what I was expecting. Not to say that RE-MAIN is wrong for not focusing on that, but I also probably wouldn't have chosen the amnesia route if I wanted to tell a goofy feel-good sports narrative.

But I digress: Nice.

Of course, Minato's efforts only can go so far. His physical rehab means his body can finally move around without crutches, but he's still atrophied from six months of being bedridden. Likewise, he didn't get into the best school in his prefecture—only the second-best.

And already he finds himself saddled with a lackey! This is Eitaro, an old friend of Minato's from his old school. Minato can't remember him (or any of his old friends, really) because of his amnesia. But Eitaro is quite keen on Minato rejoining the water polo team. A bit too much, though...
I really like that Minato is not at all eager to play water polo again. It makes total sense too. Why live in the shadow of your past unknowable self when you can branch out and turn over a new leaf? Unfortunately, the forces of man and nature conspire to dunk his ass back in the drink.

And one of those "forces" is an extremely ill-advised bet his past down-bad self made in order to get a kiss from a girl. Karma comes for us all, whether we remember it or not.
Ah yes, Chinu, Minato's kinda-sorta love interest! When we first meet her, she's practically the centerfold girl in a swimming magazine. Imagine the look on Minato's face when the girl from the magazine plants one on him!

She's actually not that close to Minato (they'd only spoken three times), but she does get quite invested in his recovery as a water polo player. We can see her on the outskirts of the story, pulling strings so Minato has an easier time of things, but these early episodes don't give her much to do than be a beard.
I wish they weren't so chummy, and I wish that Minato's $2000 promise was literally the only reason why he takes up the sport again, but that's only because I think it would be much funnier that way.

We soon learn, though, that a full water polo team requires seven players, so finding more boys is what actually becomes the focus of these early episodes.

We also soon learn that the standard water polo uniform is, uh, well, not a whole lot.

This is basically the return of Free!, what with the lovingly-animated water, the boys in speedos, and the charming dynamics between these strapping young lads who sadly lack nipples. And you can read the show as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge affair if you want but that's not really the point of it. There's no sense of the cast being leered at—even Chinu doesn't get much attention when she's in her wetsuit.

Yeah, it's definitely more funny and functional than outright fanservicey. Though I have to admit, I had my doubts at first: are professional water polo players really treading water in nothing but a speedo for hours on end? Well I checked some Olympics coverage and, spoiler: they are.

And regardless, there's nothing wrong with some mostly nude male camaraderie in a laughably tiny hot tub.

Bros make do.

I gotta say, it was really easy for me to fall in with this cast. They've done a great job giving everyone lovely personalities. For example, you've got the team leader Jojima. He seems flashy, but he takes water polo very seriously—such that he'd practice all on his own when there weren't other team members.

Totally agreed! Despite my qualms about the tonal clashes in Minato's arc, the other main polo players have a good balance of endearing, goofy, and compelling characteristics. Yutaka, for example, is a kind guy who loves making sweets, but he also shares some of his experiences growing up mixed-race, and how societal stereotypes have put undue pressure on him. That kind of sensitivity was a nice surprise from RE-MAIN.
I very much appreciate the hafu representation with Yutaka, who is established as half-Nigerian. Also, his design is worlds apart from even Chocolove's redesign from last week's Shaman King. A little sensitivity goes a long way! Also, Yutaka is just all-around a sweet boy. He lags behind his teammates in terms of development, but it's heartwarming to see the effort he puts into his training. He's very much the heart of the team. Also, his family is so cute!
On the not-so-cute end of things, Eitaro—in addition to dressing like a TikTok influencer who's about to tell you about his proprietary cryptocurrency—turns out to be a serial liar and manipulator.


And, well, at least he's not boring!
We'll come back to Eitaro in a minute, because his double-facedness comes around into one of the best scenes in the first six episodes. But I also want to talk about the other teammates. Like Ejiri! Formerly from the baseball team, he's a hothead who butts heads with his teammates on a regular basis. But he's also one of the few teammates with actual athletic training, so he quickly becomes an asset to the team. As it turns out, he also has less-than-innocent reasons for joining; the number of players on his baseball team meant he was always benched. He transferred to water polo in the hopes of actually being able to stand out and make a name for himself.

Their other main athletic asset is the reluctant swimmer wunderkind Amihama, who gets to race against (and mercilessly trounce) the rest of the polo team while dealing with his deep-rooted inferiority complex. But don't worry, he's just as dumb as the rest, so he still ends up joining the team.
There's a fun twist with Amihama. At first, his reluctance to join water polo comes from his inability to compete with his brother. The show doesn't tell us just what it was that happened to his brother that keeps Amihama from competing against him. It makes you suspect the worst... until it's revealed Amihama's older brother was Minato's teammate at his old water polo team!
Amihama's brother is doubly important because he also name-drops the show in the most spectacularly stupid way possible. Like, this is the amount of convolution you'd come up with as a joke to make fun of title drops as a phenomenon, but RE-MAIN delivers it with complete sincerity. I love it.


And you know it's a good title when you have to devote a full minute of runtime explaining it.
For the record: Minato referenced the naming for an obscure rule in water polo concerning goal tending. And even within the context of the show, someone points out that the name of the rule had long since been changed to "offsides"! I wonder if that was put in as a result of someone on the writing team learning that as they went along? #ScneizelJustMadeAnIllegalMove
I think anime creators just love naming shows something with a "Re-" prefix and working backwards from there.
Last and kinda least of all we have Ushimado. He's the meekest member of the team, and also the worst. He has no stamina, he can barely speak above a whisper, and he struggles with standing out in any capacity.
Finally, a team member I can relate to. Seriously, tho, I do like him a lot. He gets bullied by some classmates into joining the team as a joke, but since the other players turn out to be genuinely nice, he feels like he found a home—which just makes him feel worse about how bad he is. That's a good, wholesome struggle.
There's a very twisted scene later in the series where the team thinks Ushimada is about to succumb to his depression and it turns out he's just fixing a clothesline; he has more iron to him than he looks, but he definitely suffers a lot from his own weak self-esteem. As it turns out, one thing that makes him way better of a player is... vocalizing.
This is a real thing too! I mean, I can't speak for water polo specifically, but when I was learning to fence in college, one of our coaches advised us to shout and yell after getting a touch on an opponent, because it does have a sort of primal psychological effect that can help pump you up.
A pity it took him so long to learn about shouting. Would've been helpful when they were losing that practice match 18-0.

... To a bunch of grade-schoolers, no less.
Yeah, I feel like maybe we've been selling this show as more serious than it is. Because it is a sports anime where the protagonist's team, in their very first game, gets clobbered by a bunch of children. Outplayed on every level. Beat down so bad it almost destroys the team permanently. It's hilarious.

This is, incidentally, what forces Eitaro to confess his nefarious schemes to Minato. He was convinced that Minato had some latent amnesia-proof talent that would help propel any team to inevitable victory, so after a gaggle of 10-year-olds destroys them, Eitaro decides to immediately give up.
As it turns out, water polo is brutal and a massive chunk of it is figuring out what you can get away with without the referee seeing it—as the show puts it, the refs can't stop anything if its under water. Even Minato is left bewildered at how intense the match was, which leads to a lot of soul-searching with his old coach.

Time to pull that pin out from Eitaro, because this leads to what I think is the best moment of the first six episodes. Minato asks his coach what it was that made him the prodigy he was. You think at first the coach is gonna go into some complicated jargon like, "Oh, your double-jointedness made you better". But no—as it turns out, the one thing that truly made Minato the best was that he just plain old worked harder at water polo than anyone else. He went so far as to study the evolution of the game's rulings to chart the growth of water polo's metagame.

Yeah if there's a single "lesson" to be taken from RE-MAIN, it's probably this. And to be fair, it's a good one to take To Heart. Even the most talented athletes in the world need to put in tons of hard work and guts to fulfill their potential. There's no shortcut to being your best. Everybody's gotta take the long road.

And RE-MAIN being RE-MAIN, it emphasizes this point subtly and eloquently with the Symbolism Turtle.

Eitaro's biggest problem is that he just assumed Minato was born better than he was. As a creative who's been writing all his life (literally since I was 7, not that my readership or ability reflects it), ability doesn't come from some innate "talent". It comes from spending hours and hours working at something and figuring out what works for you and what doesn't. And sometimes even that's not enough, but it's a very tough-but-important lesson for anyone to learn.
Despite being quite understandably creeped out at first, Minato's able to get that message across to Eitaro too and save the team, and he does so in the most classically scenic of scholastic venues.

Or not.
In a weird way, Minato's amnesia couldn't stop his old hard-working nature from bleeding through, and whether he realizes it or not it ends up helping his team. It was his idea for Ushimado to try shouting to improve his passes, it's he who keeps Eitaro from quitting over his insecurities. Those shades of RE-MAIN being a show about an athlete recovering from an accident are still kinda-sorta there.

I appreciate that Minato isn't just a ball of chipper can-do attitudes. There are so many opportunities for him to just be a blind pollyana and I'm glad that doesn't happen. He has his moments where he can't just positively think his way out. But at six episodes in, he's doing a bang-up job of showing us just how much giving things the old college try can do for someone.

My half-cour assessment of RE-MAIN is "strange, but effective." It's not an outstanding sports anime in any one regard, and the animation especially struggles to keep up with the kineticism of a polo game (probably doesn't help that this is like MAPPA's 20th anime this year), but as an original team-driven narrative, it's got a lot of charm and energy. And Minato constantly mispronouncing things is a good bit.
RE-MAIN definitely charmed me, but the whole time I watched it I knew I wouldn't remember much of the show once I had finished setting it down. It looks pretty enough, Minato is charming enough, the story is engaging enough—but it's not quite there. I think this show has a lot of potential as a gateway drug for folks who don't normally watch anime; I had a pleasant conversation with one of my coworkers this past week about this show, and it intrigued them. But it's a wholly adequate sports anime. I do think it would have been best to focus on Minato's rehabilitation and not just gloss over that in the first episode. Right up next, we can look forward to the team having a round-robin-style match against two other teams, but I think Minato's speech about hard work is a good-enough stopping point.
And I have to broach this subject before we conclude: I'm dying to know more about his dad's denim-based souvenir business. How did he start it? Why did he start it? How are they still in business and supporting a family of four? This has been gnawing at me all day.
Is denim that big of a deal in Japan? Is this another "bowling"-thing?
The kicker is his dad absolutely looks like the kind of guy who sells jean tchotchkes for a living. Give me an anime about him.
Between him and Yutaka, you've got 200% more Dad™ in this show than in most other shows this season!
Just saying, I'm on board for the jean prequel—the jequel—anytime. For now, though, these water boys get my seal of approval.

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