I'm not a huge baseball person overall, but I hold the belief that it's more fun to play (at least on Wii Sports back when I had a Wii) than it is to watch. What could possibly change that? Cute anime girls, of course! At least, that's what I was hoping would happen, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The anime streaming service HIDIVE announces every month which anime will be removed within that month, and the subject of today's review, Cinderella Nine, is on the chopping block for this month; since it was already on my Plan to Watch list (and Crunchyroll could quietly remove it from its own service at any time), I figured that I might as well give it a go while I still could. That was a decision that, in some ways, I would come to regret; although Cinderella Nine is far from being an abysmal show, it's not really one I can recommend to anyone except for maybe hardcore baseball fans, and even that one's a stretch.
Cinderella Nine, known in Japan as "Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine" (which translates to "Cinderella Nine in August"), takes place at Satogahama High School, where new first-year student Tsubasa Arihara declares during the opening ceremony that she will be forming a girls' baseball club. To this end, she ends up recruiting several fellow students, such as her old rival Ryou Shinonome, the observant Waka Suzuki, and the quiet Maiko Kurashiki, among others. Despite the troubles that this ragtag team faces, they have fun playing baseball, whether it's practicing or playing against other schools.
Sorry about the kind of vague summary, but admittedly, the story of Cinderella Nine doesn't have much to it that makes it stand out against its cute-girls-doing-sports-things contemporaries; I haven't seen Taishou Baseball Girls yet, but it at least has a decent hook that could make it seem interesting, which is something Cinderella Nine lacks. It can also be needlessly melodramatic at times; there is an episode where two characters end their friendship - they make up by the end, don't worry - over something that just seems kind of stupid to me. The story has some elements that don't make sense to me. For example, Tsubasa says at one point that she quit her old baseball team because of how she and the other members had different goals; however, what those different goals are weren't entirely clear. That being said, I did appreciate that the people working on this clearly did their research on how baseball works. That, or they probably just took some pointers from the mobile game it's based on. Hmm, I wonder if the story not being that good has anything to do with the fact that it's based on a mobile game....
Anyway, while I may question some characters' motivations at times, none of these characters are particularly unlikable. Unfortunately, they also lack any depth, which makes them a little boring to watch. The closest I got to really caring about any of the characters is feeling bad about Maiko's situation as shown in her debut episode; ultimately, though, I didn't really like nor dislike Maiko as a character. I also disliked Ryou for a while due to her bad attitude before she ends up joining the team, but she gets better after that, even if once again, I ended up not liking nor disliking her. Ultimately, the all-female cast is there to fulfill the cute girls quota, yet I didn't really care much about any of them in any way.
While the characters may have been designed in a way to further fulfill that cute girls quota, however, the way they're animated is....not good, to say the least. The characters are often off-model, there is often either no animation when there probably should be or awkward movement that could have been fixed later, and although there are some still shots that look decent or even somewhat good, there are also still shots that are just unpleasant to look at. Now, I am willing to give TMS Entertainment a slight pass, since they might have been working on the Fruits Basket remake at the same time - both series did air during the same season - but to an average viewer, all of these visual flaws can be a bit distracting. The audio part of the series is decent, though. The voice cast does a decent job at their roles, and I've had the opening and ending themes - "Etude" by Mewhan and "Donnatokimo" by Nozomi Nishida, Reina Kondou, Saki Minami, and Honoka Inoue, respectively - play in my head a few times, if that counts for anything. I will say, though, that the latter is a cover of a song sung by Noriyuki Makihara, and I kind of prefer the original.
Overall, Cinderella Nine fell short of hitting a home run as far as good anime go. With that said, if you're a fan of the game it's based on, you might get more enjoyment out of it than I did. There are certainly better cute-girls-doing-sports-things - as well as better baseball anime - out there, though.
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