Over Drive - RePost

Back in the fall of 2006 someone had suggested I check out the shonen sports series Over Drive. I’m usually up for recommendations; because sometimes my initial biased opinions tend to be incorrect.  The series is actually about something I am very passionate about, bike racing. I quickly pulled all 8 or 9 available episodes and started watching, getting the rest as they became available.

    Over Drive follows pathetic 1st year high school student Mikoto Shinozaki as he trudges through life being a lackey to the strong and abusive. He has to buy and deliver lunch to a group of upperclassman hoodlums on a daily basis and take their verbal and physical torment, typical case. A girl in his class, Yuki, whom he is infatuated with, asks him to join the bicycle club, which her brothers head. Doing so out of desperation she never expected him to go anywhere with it given to his pathetic personality. Charged by the fact that the girl he dreams of has requested something of him he applies to the club with incredible gusto. After being reluctantly accepted by Yousuke and Terao, Mikoto begins training for the club…with just one problem, he doesn’t know how to ride a bike. Through sheer will and determination he learns how to ride the bike and begins training in earnest for the club. Along the way he discovers that one of his classmates, Takeshi, is also a cyclist and he tries to develop the bonds of friendship with this cold hearted peer. Before he knows it, he finds himself involved in the towns annual citizen’s race and has to push himself to his limits to even finish it, let alone win it.

    OK, so this is a sports anime aimed at teenage boys.  You have the sad sack, worthless, confidence lacking greenhorn main character, which is willing to walk through hell to prove his worth to the girl of his dreams. It’s the same thing every time, the archetypical underdog story. What changed my mind about this series was that Mikoto is actually likable and the series isn’t very serious, it’s actually quite goofy. Unfortunately, that only lasted for about 9 or so episodes and by that time I had gotten attached to the characters and wanted to see where the story was progressing. The series pretty much started to not be entertaining anymore when the race started. It went from being non genre conforming to a text book example of a shonen sports series. Until I got to that point I had lauded the show on just those qualities, that it wasn’t all about the characters mentally sparing with the other bikers and filling every single second of the show with unnecessary commentary about every ones tactics and what not and assumed what evers.

    The worst episodes were the ones detailing the reason why Ishida…err I mean Takeshi (Kurosuke) is so passionate about cycling. This is all stemming from him moving to a small Italian village for a number of years and developing friendships with the local cycling peers (something out of pre WW2 Italy or like the rural Bicycle Thief). This 2 or 3 episode arc was so mind numbingly unnecessary that I was grateful to get back to droll racing commentary.

    As I grudgingly trudged through the series I began to despise it, yet I had too finish it, just for the sake of being sucked into it and not realizing how horrible it had become until half way through. It actually paid off in the end, and I was mildly glad I had watched the series, even though it was quite painful for the majority of it. It didn’t end like most shonen series and at the end I actually wanted to see more as the characters began to plan their attempt to be the first Japanese team to win the Tour de France. Aside from all of the stereotypical shonen trappings the characters are very likable and for well developed. There were a number of things that were left unanswered that would have been nice to find out, like why Mikoto was kept from riding bikes when he was younger.

    In the beginning this is a fun series, especially when they shave Mikoto, but it does a 180 when the race begins and falls into all the classic shonen sports/adventure trappings. If you’re into stuff like that enjoy, if not you still might get something out of this series. I would like to see more with the characters, but I’m not going to be too terribly upset if they never continue the story. It was however a good thing to watch during the winter months while I rode my bike in my living room.

UPDATE: As of October 2013 this series has not been licensed in North America and will probably never see the light of day.  Worse things have happened.