Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story

Infamous among those who gamble on golf games, Eve uses her exceptional skill in the sport to earn a living—by betting and winning against various opponents. Known as the "Rainbow Bullet," she vows to beat her foes and conquer the world of underground golf using only three clubs. However, the universe where Eve knows no defeat is shaken after she plays a clean game with Aoi Amawashi, a golfing prodigy that came to the country of Nafrece to enter a golf tournament. Armed with talent and born into the perfect environment for golf, Aoi the "Innocent Tyrant" calmly crushes her enemies with a bright smile on her face.

After their game-changing match, Eve and Aoi become intrigued with each other and promise to battle again someday. As Eve's aggressive and risk-taking approach challenges the elite and steady playstyle of Aoi, the two geniuses may just manage to bring golf to unexpected heights.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Evangeline Main

Kitou, Akari Japanese

Amawashi, Aoi Main

Seto, Asami Japanese

Aleon, Rose Supporting

Yukinari, Toa Japanese

Saotome, Ichina Supporting

Fujita, Saki Japanese

Vipère Supporting

Nazuka, Kaori Japanese

Clara, Klein Supporting

Kinoshita, Sayaka Japanese

Lipman, Lily Supporting

Sekine, Akira Japanese

Millafoden, Leo Supporting

Ikeda, Shuuichi Japanese

Amawashi, Seira Supporting

Kaida, Yuuko Japanese

Iijima, Kaoruko Supporting

Ichimichi, Mao Japanese

Fukuda, Kouhei Producer

Sekiyama, Akihiro Producer

Inagaki, Takayuki Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Takakuwa, Hajime Sound Director

Reviews

Jun 28, 2022

somaisbatman

Recommended

This show is good enough that it got me to round up my lesbian friends and play mini-golf. That’s the short review, but I can go long as well.

You should know going into this that I despise real golf and everything it stands for. But lucky for me, Birdie Wing is not a show that respects its sport. In the very first episode, our main character declares “I don’t play golf. I hit a ball with a stick for money.” She's so stupid. This *show* is so stupid, the kind of stupid you get out of 2000's anime and can't help but adore. It's also ... the most fun I've had out of a seasonal in years.

Birdie Wing’s production details have been a hilarious mystery to unravel. Original sports anime are quite rare, so I was baffled as to how this show even got made until I started digging further. Bandai-Namco is our production company, which quickly becomes evident with the tongue-in-cheek Gundam product placement. But behind the scenes, Birdie Wing is inexplicably being financed by HTC’s virtual reality branch. On top of the anime, this partnership will result in a “metaverse museum” and a Nintendo Switch game.

So how well did they use their VR bucks? Well, Birdie Wing’s production values are never excellent, and CG is understandably used to cut corners on the golf courses. However, the character designs are superb, with plenty of unique outfits for the main duo. The animation can be limited at times, but it hits when it needs to, with absurd golf swings and imposing shot angles. The Osamu Dezaki-styled dramatic watercolor freezeframes are an excellent homage. It’s pretty clear that someone on the production team has a waifu, as Aoi is animated way better than everyone else.

Perhaps the greater miracle is that Birdie Wing is good. Everything I mentioned above ends up being a pretty sketchy foundation for a show, and since it’s an original, the screenwriter attached to the project matters a lot. They ended up bringing Yosuke Kuroda on board, whose writing credentials include girls-with-guns kinda-yuri Madlax and the extremely pornographic combat definitely-yuri Valkyrie Drive: Mermaid. So we’re getting lesbians, and we’re getting ridiculous over-the-top action scenes. Somehow, I think he was one of the best possible picks for this.

His script does the impossible and makes golf entertaining. We get a main character who despises her sport and tears it apart with brute-force power and precision. We get a seedy underground golf mafia arc. We get a roulette of increasingly depraved older women in said mafia. We get golfing abilities described with brazenly pornographic innuendo, delightful over-the-top melodrama, classic sports anime rivalry, and maybe even an assassination or two. And most importantly, we get delicious, delicious yuri-bait.

Look, I’m a lesbian first and a golfer last, so I’m going to be real with you. This is a “show, don’t tell” kind of yuri. There’s plenty of plausibly-deniable romance scenes, but you won’t be getting any confessions up-front. However, actions speak louder than words, and when Eve hits a ball so far that Aoi can see it from her flight about to take off, and Aoi makes vows to meet her again while wearing a Char cosplay on a VR golf course, that’s the kind of stuff that counts for me. If I’m reading the foreshadowing right, there’s a nonzero chance that they’re going to be revealed to be sisters in the second season. It would be a laughably bad move, but given the unavoidable skeeziness of some of Kuroda’s works, I can’t say I wasn’t ready. Also this show does the delightful women’s sports anime thing where most of the side characters pair cleanly off with each other.

I’m so glad this show exists, and that it’s somehow the opposite of a soulless money-grab given its circumstances. I could care less about the planned tie-in content landscape, but what matters is that Birdie Wing the anime is made out of love. In my ideal world, we would have one of these every season. Sports yuri is the good stuff, and I can’t wait to see the golf butches being teased for Season 2 in action.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Jun 28, 2022

literaturenerd

Mixed Feelings

Birdie Wing is my vote for the most surprising anime of the season. This is an original property not based on a manga, VN, LN, etc. The script writer of Excel Saga just decided one day that he wanted to make a women's golf anime in which professional women's golf is heavily tied to the mafia. The mafia places bets on the golfers in order to settle disputes and the golfers compete in a massive underground lair based on the NERV GeoFront from Evangelion. This anime is fucking insane. You never know exactly what you're going to get from script writer Yosuke Kuroda. Sometimes his ... batshit insanity actually manages to work splendidly, as is the case with Excel Saga, Trigun, and Hellsing Ultimate. Unfortunately, he's also penned some duds like Goblin Slayer, Jungle de Ikou, and Valkyrie Drive Mermaid.

Kuroda's writing quality and consistency invokes the opening lines of A Tale of 2 Cities. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

How do you convince people to watch an anime about women's golf? No seriously, I'm asking the reader! I know 6 guys offline who watch anime and I've failed to convince any of them to watch a single episode of Birdie Wing despite begging them for 2 months straight.

I know everyone else is going to mention this, so I may as well address it. Birdie Wing is officially the gayest sports anime ever made! Yuri on Ice has NOTHING on Birdie Wing. Yuri on Ice is the story of a depressed, down on his luck skater who has to recapture his passion for the sport and bounce back. He kind of has a thing for his coach, but there honestly isn't a lot of sexual tension in most of the scenes they share together. Birdie Wing feels like the main 2 girls are going to throw their clubs to the ground and frantically start making out in basically every scene they share. There was even a meme article called "There is literally no heterosexual explanation for Birdie Wing". However, Birdie Wing isn't tagged as a yuri. It was never advertised as a yuri. The studio has never said that it's a yuri. I thought that surely if this was intended to be a yuri, they would have said so at some point during Pride Month and yet they didn't. So, was this accidental? Is it all a joke? What the fuck is this? I have a hard time believing that this was done on accident. The first Top Gun was probably an accident. Birdie Wing was almost certainly on purpose, so I can only conclude that this is a stealth yuri that doesn't want to advertise itself as such. Possibly to avoid it getting banned in certain countries. That's honestly my best theory. Now fans in Indonesia can buy Birdie Wing. Fans in Saudi Arabia can buy Birdie Wing. Fans in Russia can...pirate it like you guys always do anyways.

Finally, I'll get to the conventional part of the review. Birdie Wing is a mixed bag overall. Firstly, I'd like to start with the positives. The characters are really fun. The plot takes turns going from predictable to being utterly insane. Birdie Wing is often laughably ridiculous, but that's the point and it doesn't take itself too seriously. I also really like Eve and Aoi as a couple. They are so cute together! The OP is also amazing, and I've not skipped it a single time. On the negative side, Birdie Wing's sheer stupidity can be off-putting to many people. I've never had to work this hard to sell my offline friends on an anime. Usually, I can get at least 1 of them to watch any given anime. The CG is also pretty egregious at times. This was not made on a high budget and certainly won't be winning awards as the prettiest looking anime of the season. Lastly, the relationship between Eve and Aoi at this point is simply bait with no official confirmation that they're actually a couple. I will actually be pissed if Eve and Aoi don't kiss at some point in S2. For the show to bait THIS hard and then chicken out because they're afraid of the show getting banned in countries that don't legally purchase or stream anime anyways would be pretty shitty.

Would I recommend Birdie Wing? Yes. This is definitely one of the must-watch anime of 2022, for the absurdity if for no other reason. I found it highly entertaining, and I hope anyone who I convince to try it out will be entertained as well!

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Jun 28, 2022

Gween_Gween

Not Recommended

One of the issues while assessing the quality of an anime is that it is always assumed that the people behind the project are trying to deliver a product that is intended to be, at least, entertaining and profficient. The problem of Birdie Wing is that behind the shock factors and subversive absurdities there is an extremely bland progression, with endless tensionless episodes, awfully forced comedic gags, and an uninteresting artistic direction, defined by stiff characters gestures and an awful artificial green color that my eyes cannot but cringe to. The reality is that the anime is obviously not trying at all on those aspects, ... and it will subsequently enter the category of “Too bad that it could be good” type of shows that some people are obsessed about, for better or worse. To elaborate this, there are three fair warnings before even starting this anime:

- The golf aspect is garbage, they never try to do more than skeletal montages of people using superpowers to create entertainment out of it. The cause of this decision is that the production thinks that golf is boring, so they tried to do a Mario Golf type of anime, or another reference, I don’t know about that stuff. Maybe they want to promote a game, I don’t care.

- Most episodes are a drag at face value, they normally feature one or two moments that could give you a sincere laugh or a sudden shock, but most of the time they are just mundane dialogues interpolated with some scenes that try to wake up the viewer by blasting you with a surprise

- By using the two definitions above, the only correct way of watching this anime is to laugh at the decisions that the team behind this anime made, not the content by itself. Whether the entertainment out of that is valid or not depends on the individual.

Going to the details, the premise of the show is basically the journey from poverty and delinquency to legit golf competition of the main girl. This is apparently unoffensive at first, but the anime manages to make it an explosion of absurdity by using the implications of her wealth position, as the logic of being able to even do such transition doesn’t add up unless certain requirements are completed. The next paragraphs have some mild spoilers to explain why this anime is not just random stuff, but why it also sucks.

The first important detail about the premise is that it is trying to portray the rivalry about two girls that live in diametrically opposed positions in the scale of privilege, and it tries to portray such rivalry through a sport where they must face each other, to finally converge into a friendship relationship of mutual respect and love, as they both grow of each other. This is the first subversion, as golf is a sport that is normally associated with an elite, with wealthiness, and having no connection with the sport or being poor is just a high hurdle that is hard to jump.

Those two main characters are Aoi, a Japanese girl, and Eve, a European girl (?). As you may guess, Eve is the one that is poor and Aoi is the one that is rich, because that is how anime works. As the subversion exists, the anime tries to give a proper answer to the fact that Eve could even be good at golf. The solution is generating an underground system that enables Eve improvement, despite her overbearing family responsibilities and her incapability to enter the circuit. Therefore, the mafia aspect is not as nonsense or random as it may seem, it is just a logical consequence of how to establish a proper reasoning behind her opportunities.

Once given this reasoning, the mafia aspect and the mysterious trainer start to make some sense. Underground gambling, fraudulent tourneys, real estate corruption, all of them enable Eve to be able to break free from poverty through golf, because otherwise she wouldn’t have the resources to begin with, criticism towards social mobility. What this seems to propose is that, with the current state of things, there is no other option but to incur in such shady operations. Eve’s trainer also represents the basics of how education manage to empower the character to be able to compete with those who had proper advantages produced by an actual infrastructure, the presence of such legendary golfer in that context is fixed by a set of coincidences, as people in the situation of Eve could just find such opportunity by a strike of luck and an actual interest to be good at their craft, the value of education and motivation in disadvantaged communities.

The underground activity also brings parallels to different perspectives about the same development. Rose represents those who find comfort into staying as the biggest fish in a small tank, while Vipere represents those who have no qualms about cheating the system to survive. As Eve develop her golf and find the light at the end of the tunnel, she must now stay away from her past. The system that allowed her to get out of the slums is also biting her back.

As a matter of summary, Eve is Chief Keef. RIP Nipsey

If this anime was just a mafia anime with golf, then it would be an interesting ride, the underground antics could have a better emphasis and the characters would be able to develop a multitude of hardships that come from modern issues. Sadly, for anyone who has no interest on mediocre yuri attempts, the anime stops using this concept at the final third of the anime. The last arc of the anime is just a bunch of pathetic golf montages that abuse a joke that has been tired in the second episode of the anime and the cast simping or hating on Eve.

While one can see this ending of the cour fitting, as the struggle of Eve has been finally overcome and she can reap the fruits of her effort, the reality is that this final stretch can be just enjoyed by laughing at some ridiculous decisions of the anime (Or by shipping, I don’t kink shame). Awful lip syncing, slideshows with awkward music, jokes about the laziness of the writing, reusage of material, over dramatic shots, the anime just have nothing else to say and start to do dumb stuff to wake up the viewer, the momentum just hit a full-stop when they must dedicate themselves to golf. Maybe the caddie of Eve and Aoi could now represent a new element of overcoming the status quo, as Aoi must face her mother and the weight on her shoulders and the caddie must showcase her talent against the odds, but their gags and developments are just too mundane to be enjoyable, as they are barely anything but sporadic statements about their feelings.

As a conclusion, if Birdie Wing tried to be an enjoyable anime that makes golf a fun experience, then they completely failed, as the golf aspect is simply the worst part of the whole experience. It is not equivalent to the typical sport anime that develop tension, knowledge, and more importantly, interest about it. Birdie Wing instead look for elements that could bring entertainment and drama in-between the golf matches, entertainment that takes a nosedive once the unique and absurd aspect of the show disappears, and the trail of entertainment is composed by tropey silly power-ups. Sadly, if I want to see a rich girl and a poor girl being rivals and developing a hilarious comedy with an honest friendship I would watch others shows, and if I want to see a golf anime that use this kind of superpowers I would rather sleep.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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