Blue Box perfectly captures two heart-racing feelings. One of an intense sports match where every second and every movement matters. One miniscule mistake, and you are out. The other feeling is love. Seeing your crush show up unexpectedly or watching their every movement from across the room. Both of these make the heart race, and the Blue Box adaptation will second-handedly instill these feelings in you when you watch.
The Blue Box anime is an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Kouji Miura. Despite its delicate and charming art style, one might be turned off from Blue Box upon hearing that it’s a romance in a high school setting, especially if one is burnt out on that theme. Even though the setting for the work is nothing new, what makes Blue Box special is its ability to make the viewer recall feelings they may have once had when dealing with love.
While the animation is almost objectively stunning, visuals alone aren’t enough to carry a good romance story. Fortunately, Blue Box brings many outstanding elements to create a well-balanced school-romance anime. Blue Box Season 1 started airing on October 3, 2024, and wrapped up on March 20 with episode 25. Season 2 production was already confirmed.
An Ordinary Setting with Extraordinary Characters
Blue Box follows high-schooler Taiki Inomata, a badminton player with his sights forever set on making nationals. However, he can never truly be 100% focused on the sport, as his crush, Chinatsu Kano, shares the practice gym at school as a member of the girls’ basketball team.
Due to Chinatsu’s family’s work abroad, she unexpectedly starts living in Taiki’s house, making the distraction even harder for him to deal with. The story follows Taiki and Chinatsu as they both desire to make nationals. Another vital character to the plot is Hina Chouno, Taiki’s best female friend and fellow athlete.
I picked up the Blue Box manga long before the anime was even announced. It sat on my Shonen Jump app for months as I debated picking it up, and eventually its soft art style alone sold me on opening up volume one. My biggest praise early on for Blue Box was how the author decided to display emotions—not through walls of text, but rather through the facial and bodily expressions of characters.
This made Blue Box easy to binge quickly while also taking the time to appreciate Kouji Miura’s artwork. You can understand what the author wants you to understand about these characters through these intense expressions alone. I feel similarly about the anime.
While I normally despise the “my crush moved next door to me/in with me” trope in anime, I’ll let it slide in Blue Box, as the series tends to avoid blatant fanservice often found in this cliche. Most of the scenes in the anime take place on school grounds, and while watching, I sometimes completely forget that Taiki and Chinatsu live together, as it isn’t the main focus of the complications in the series. One of the main plot points, perhaps the most important one, is the involvement of Hina, my favorite character and a gymnast who has the potential to be the best in the nation.
In romance anime, it’s common that a “third wheel” character is vitriolic with bad intentions (unless I’m reading way too many 90s shoujo manga). Hina is the complete opposite of this, despite being head over heels for Taiki, knowing that he likes Chinatsu. Hina respects Chinatsu, even though she has the full potential to be a rival. There’s no bullying, there’s no talking smack behind each other’s back, and this is refreshing. Hina, Taiki, and Chinatsu all work around their feelings with complete respect for each other (okay, okay, I know Hina can tease Taiki quite a bit). Even until the very end, Hina questions why she isn’t good enough and doesn’t necessarily call Chinatsu not good enough. Spoiler Alert: In Episode 24, after Taiki rejects Hina, she is still careful not to overstep any boundaries concerning Chinatsu, despite Hina’s jealousy of her.
Blue Box explores these intense feelings without any intense or overly dramatic actions. This makes Blue Box feel extremely realistic. I understand that bullying and cruelty are fairly commonplace in high school, but there was no need for Boys Over Flowers level of bullying in Blue Box just because someone doesn’t get their way (for real, they tie a girl to a moving car in that series). The characters also don’t get into traumatic pasts, like much anime does. Hina, Taiki, and Chinatsu are fairly normal teenagers, and Miura explores teenage puppy love so precisely and in a way that is easy to relate to.
The Rest is the Cherry on Top
A sports anime is only as good as its animation, and that’s not an overexaggeration. Movement is everything in sports, and I can’t see a sports anime going over well if it has the same amount of movement as, say, The Way of the House Husband. That isn’t to be an animation snob, as I think most of us do want to see as much action as possible in anime sports matches. Blue Box, though, isn’t necessarily a sports anime, but the element of sports is an important component to the characters. Telecom Animation Film is the studio behind the Blue Box anime adaptation, and I think Blue Box is their best work to date, even when compared to their other titles such as Tower of God and Orange.
Blue Box is a character drama with sports elements. It’s vital for the main cast to stand out and for their movements in sports matches to be stunning. The animation style of Blue Box reminds me a bit of Kyoto Animation’s Violet Evergarden, which is quite the comparison due to the pedestal anime fans place Violet Evergarden on for its animation alone.
The individual pieces of hair that stand out on Chinatsu and glow in the light help add to her otherwise simple character design. Taiki’s design is also quite simple but is brought to life through Telecom Animations Films’ attention to detail, such as carrying over his unique expressions from Miura’s manga. The sports scenes in Blue Box are just as entertaining as those in Haikyuu!!, although they aren’t the main focus of the work.
I won’t go too much into the voice work on Blue Box, as it isn’t my specialty, but nonetheless, the voice actors flawlessly bring to life the characters that I first fell in love with while reading the manga. I’m so thankful the first season of the anime ran for 25 episodes, adapting 9 volumes of manga and ending at quite the dramatic rejection. At the time of this writing, we were expecting an announcement from Blue Box to follow the premiere of the final episode of season one in the West—an announcement that could easily be about Season 2 (Update: Season 2 production was already confirmed).
Unfortunately, throughout the season, the anime premiered one episode behind in the West, one week after the Japanese release on Netflix.
You should dive into Blue Box for the sports and romance themes, but stay for the deep characters, heart-racing situations, and stunning animation. As a manga reader of Blue Box, I was more than satisfied with the anime adaptation to the point where I almost enjoyed it more than the manga, which is quite rare for me with romance.
You can watch Blue Box on Netflix.
© Kouji Miura /SHUEISHA/ Blue Box Film Partners
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