菜なれ花なれ

NA-NARE HANA-NARE

Sports

ANIME

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
12
RELEASE
September 22, 2024
LENGTH
24 min

DESCRIPTION

Misora Kanata is a first-year student on the Takanosaki High School cheerleading team. She won a national championship in middle school, but can’t jump after a mistake in a competition. She befriends Suzuha, Shion, Anna, Nodoka, and Megumi to form the PoMPoMs. Their new team goes beyond cheerleading to reach the hearts of the people they cheer on. They might just change the world!

(Source: Crunchyroll, edited)

CAST

Anna Aveiro
Larissa Tago Takeda
Nodoka Ootani
Manaka Iwami
Suzuha Obunai
Yuki Nakashima
Shion Tanizaki
Moe Kahara
Megumi Kaionji
Miku Itou
Kanata Misora
Rika Nakagawa
Mari Aieda
Kana Ichinose
Noichigo Izawa
Azusa Tadokoro
Miyabi Kushida
Yuu Serizawa
Hiiragi Kanzaki
Rikako Aida
Hana Nabatame
Yuuna Kitahara

EPISODES

Dubbed

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Not available on crunchyroll

REVIEWS

Juliko25
44/100
Narenare is little more than saccharine, directionless fluff that completely botches everything it attempts to do.
Man, why the hell did I ever force myself to watch this trainwreck of a show? One of three anime produced by PA Works for the summer 2024 season, Nanare Hananare, or Narenare for short, is a "cute girls doing cute things" anime focused on...cheerleading? We already had an anime about cheerleading, Anima Yell. Remember that show? I only checked out Narenare because it looked cute, but man do I regret it. I'm not going to mince words here, I haven't seen many anime that PA Works have made, but out of the ones I've seen, Narenare is the worst thing they put out. No, I haven't seen what many consider to be their actual worst work, Glasslip, nor do I want to. Why would I want to subject myself to that disaster? And before anyone says anything, no, I don't have anything against the whole "cute girls doing cute things" genre. There are quite a few shows I like that fit into that bill, but many of my favorites tend to have more to offer than just "hurr-durr, look at these cute anime girls." Narenare is a show that claims it has more to offer than just CGDCT, but every attempt it makes to be something meaningful or interesting completely falls flat and is completely, horribly mediocre.

Normally I'd give a summary of what a show is about, but in the case of Narenare, I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to be about, really. It claims to be about a girl, Kanata, who is struggling with something called yips, resulting in her being booted out of her school's cheerleading team, but then she meets a Brazilian girl who browbeats her and other girls into forming a cheerleading group focusing on making videos for her channel. Actually, Narenare as a show can't seem to figure out just what its end goal is supposed to be. To have the girls be their own cheerleading group? To make some sort of viral video? The whole show feels directionless, like nobody on staff has any real idea of what they want the show to be about, and what few plot points it does focus on only come up when the show itself thinks its convenient. Even the cheerleading in this show just feels like it was thrown in just to give the characters something to do, like "We're cheerleaders, and we're gonna go around cheering on random strangers over really stupid stuff to make them happy, even for something as unnecessary as using eyedrops!" Like...I'm pretty sure that's not how cheerleading works. If some group of girls went around butting into people's business with cheerleading, they'd just be seen as annoying rather than endearing. So not only does Narenare not know how cheerleading works, they try to shoehorn it into literally everything, even when it'd be completely pointless to have it be there.

Furthermore, the characters are little more than one-note moe stereotypes with squeaky voices who never evolve past their main archetype, and even when the show TRIES to develop them, every attempt it makes at doing so completely botches any potential they could have utilized with them. Narenare's biggest problem with handling both its story and characters is that it thinks it's doing a good job at getting you to care about them, but not only do its attempts at developing them come off as shallow and surface-level at best, any kind of arc they get winds up getting resolved in the very next episode. And seriously, the show pulls neat and easy resolutions to literally everything from out of its ass, and does this for EVERY. SINGLE. PLOTLINE. Kanata has yips and can't go back to her cheerleading team? That's fixed by her going to a whole new team and abandoning her old one! A shop that Anna has an emotional attachment to is about to be shut down? Let's have everyone perform a cheerleading routine and have Anna be friends with super famous musicians who conveniently stop by and save it at the very last minute, with a dollop of emotional blackmail and stupidity on top! Kanata is lambasted by everyone for going behind their backs doing solo cheer routines and hurts herself? Let's have Megumi, the local walking talking inspiration porn, perform a physically daunting cheer routine in the rain and milk as much sympathy from the audience as possible! There is one segment that TRIES to be more dramatic and not have an easy solution, the aforementioned episode about PomPoms cutting back on cheer routines but Kanata doing solo ones without their permission, but not only do the show's staff ignore the more obvious, helpful solution by having everyone talk things out, what Kanata did in the grand scheme of things isn't even all that bad, but everyone around her acts like she committed a fucking murder, devolving into the kind of insipid, ridiculous melodrama you'd find in Elsie Dinsmore.

But its lack of scaffolding, scattershot narrative, and stereotyped characters aren't Narenare's only problems. Take for example the visuals. The animation by itself is fine, though I really don't like how literally every single character has two-toned hair. However, there is one thing about the show's art style that really bogs it down: Who thought it was a good idea to have colored border lines on literally EVERYTHING? Seriously, this makes what should be a normal, pleasant artstyle akin to Aquatope and Sakura Quest look absolutely gaudy and eye-straining. These are used on not just the backgrounds, but the characters, I mean it when I say this is used throughout the entire show, and unfortunately, it's a feature, not a bug. I don't know if this was a deliberate stylistic choice, but it's one that really doesn't work, because it makes everything look radioactive. Seriously, it says a lot when another show PA Works made in this same season, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, looks way better than this and is easier on the eyes due to having regular black outlines on everything. Oh, and do I even need to mention the bad CGI for the cheerleading performances? I have even less to say about the soundtrack, as it's just your usual bland, squeaky J-pop that I'm pretty sure rips off other OSTs from other shows. Speaking of audio, by God is Kanata's voice annoying as hell, especially when she screams.

I'm not going to waste more of my time on this show. Nanare Hananare is dull, annoying, gaudy, cloying, has absolutely no idea what it wants to do with itself, and is pretty much corporate shill that think it's good when it really isn't. PA Works, I know you can do much better than this. How in the world did you manage to mess up a show like this so badly?! It's so easy to fix this show's many mistakes! If you wanted to do a CGDCT show, this is NOT the way to go about it. Seriously, skip Narenare for all it's worth. There are many shows out there that are just way better than this, like A Place Further Than The Universe, Laid-Back Camp, Do It Yourself, Sakura Quest, Shirobako, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, Super Cub, Kanon, Air, Clannad, Bocchi The Rock, Girls Band Cry, and so on! Spare yourself the eye-searing inanity that is Narenare.
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Sheklon
65/100
Na Nare Hana Nare delivers comforting drama with shallow conflict, decent character dynamics, and limited production.
While Na Nare Hana Nare may appeal to CGDCT fans, I don't think it's quite fair to reduce it to such. It focuses more on drama, characterization and "healing" (iyashikei). In fact, much more so than Sports — a label which it gets purely by convention. The theme of this show is less cheerleading itself and more 応援 ("ouen", i.e. rooting for or supporting someone in a general sense).

As a Brazilian viewer, my score and review for this anime come from obvious motivation. Anna-chan might genuinely be one of the most accurately portrayed Brazilian characters I have seen in anime so far. In fact, a quality of this anime is being mindful of how stereotypes can (should) be used only as stepping stone to further understand a person.

The characters are at the same derived from their archetype but also have elements of a mental universe which extends beyond it. For instance, Anna is the extroverted and out of place Brazilian girl who often fails to read the room and adhere to cultural manners. While this element is initially played for flavor and cuteness, it's later shown to have strongly influenced her past, especially when first moving to Japan. This aspect explains much of her personality and how that has lead her to nurture a deep passion for music, given that she was "rescued" by Y.J. — owner of the vinyl record store which, by circumstance, became a shelter for Anna, a home where she was able to feel welcomed. Similar deconstructions happen with other characters.

As encapsulated by the last episode, Na Nare Hana Nare has an interest in talking about fears, and how these fears become barriers for one's achievements. In order to answer these conflicts, characters need to develop trust in one another and form strong bonds that ought to enable them to keep pushing through their struggles. That being said, while its intentions are kind, it lacks in depth. The show is empathetic, yet fairly shallow.

It lacks a concrete main plot and some kind of lasting message. As mentioned with Anna, the anime does have the ability to be tactful and delicate in how it portrays culture, personality and psychological conflicts — yet, those conflicts are stake-less and "solved" within the spam of 1-2 episodes with the power of cheering.

On the matter of production, Na Nare Hana Nare also suffers. Its style features a poor combination of colored contour lines with a pastel color palette and simple scenarios, resulting in something that is, cryptically, vibrant yet watered down. There is also a more detrimental issue when CGI is used for most of the cheering scenes. This is combined with no camerawork whatsoever, which makes those scenes very bland, if not ugly. But I should leave a positive nod to the work behind the OP and ED, as they are very pleasant to watch, and the art throughout the show is mostly consistent.

As it is, the anime in general lacks originality and depth to persuade a spectator about anything regarding its theme which they wouldn't already be willing to agree with. I did not care about cheerleading before it (as a real life practice) and I've experienced no change in that stance afterwards. Ultimately, one who comes to the show with the proper expectations will be satisfied. I guess it's more accurate to say this show is "comforting" rather than "healing". At the end of the day, this is entertainment, and not meant to provoke thought. It succeeds in such with characters that are generally quite charismatic.
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