April 20, 2023
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By Andrew Osmond.
Free! The Ultimate Stroke is the three-hour lengthy finale to Kyoto Animation’s franchise about male aggressive swimmers. This conclusion was launched in Japanese cinemas as a two-part film, with the primary half in September 2021 and the second in April 2022.
Again at first of the franchise, Free’s first two TV seasons have been directed by Hiroko Utsumi. She’s since moved over to different studios: MAPPA to direct Banana Fish and Bones to direct SK8 The Infinity. Many of the later Free anime have been directed by Eisaku Kawanami, who wrote and directed The Ultimate Stroke movies.
Within the days when Utsumi directed Free, she memorably summed up the anime with the tagline: “Swimming, Friendship and Torsos.” Certainly, on the time Free had the fame of being a fanservice anime about boys in trunks, and even now the anime gained’t disown that picture. The primary movie begins with a number of the youthful characters discussing their hero, Haruka or “Haru,” on video. A type of characters, the cutesy Nagisa, guarantees to inform the viewers a secret about when Haru takes a shower.
Nevertheless, in the event you’ve solely seen the early Frees, it’s advisable to catch up earlier than watching the movies. An important many characters and relationships have been added to Free through the years, and The Ultimate Stroke doesn’t make allowance for newbies. Happily, the opposite foremost Free anime are streaming on Crunchyroll as of writing. The primary two sequence have been subtitled Iwatobi Swim Membership and Everlasting Summer time. They have been adopted by a prequel cinema movie, Excessive Pace! Free! Beginning Days!, which confirmed youthful variations of Haru and a number of the different characters; it was set earlier than the primary TV sequence. That movie was directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto, who additionally made the sequence Hyouka; he died within the Kyoto Animation fireplace in 2019.
Beginning Days! wasn’t only a spinoff. Whereas the sooner sequence had highlighted the fraught relationship between Haru and his shark-toothed friend-rival Rin, Beginning Days! established the character of Ikuya, one other of Haru’s different swimming companions in his early days. Ikuya would return within the subsequent Free TV sequence, subtitled Dive to the Future. This pushes the story ahead to when Haru is a college freshman, nonetheless pushing his swimming to the restrict. The Ultimate Stroke movies observe on from there, with the variations and baggage between Haru, Rin and Ikuya all sorted out (perhaps), and the trio competing on the worldwide stage.
I gained’t spoil a lot about Ultimate Stroke’s story, besides there’s a transparent division of tones as the primary movie begins. There are scenes in Japan with a variety of mild goofball antics – I’ve already talked about Nagisa’s bit, whereas Rin and Ikuya each study that some sartorial errors in earlier days by no means fade with social media. Nevertheless, Haru’s all the time taken his swimming with horrifying seriousness. Now that he’s at a world stage, that gravity appears to devour him utterly. Is there anywhere left for friendship, for enjoyable, for innocence? There are a large number of glimpses of the characters as children, and an particularly poignant flashback to when Rin met Haru the very first time. Rin was elated he had a brand new pal to swim with… just for Haru to fade on him nearly instantly, poisoning their friendship from the beginning.
Now these champions are in Sydney, a spot with particular significance for each Rin and Haru, limbering up for his or her first world occasion. Haru has an particularly fearsome rival, the Swedish swimmer Albert, who was beforehand seen within the Dive to the Future season. (Even within the Japanese model of Free!, Albert speaks English in addition to Japanese, and is performed by Jeff Manning, an American actor who lives in Japan.) Albert appears to have been constructed as a sports activities victory machine. Even when Haru may match as much as him, what can be the fee?
In the meantime, Rin and Ikuya discover themselves collectively in a night-time scene, reflecting on their totally different histories with Haru. They’re like two sides of an unusually secure love triangle (although in fact there are lots of different characters dedicated to Haru). They discover that they’re nonetheless asking, at this new pinnacle of their sports activities profession, what they really, actually need. However would possibly they realise, terrifyingly, that the individual beside them needs one thing irrevocably totally different?
Andrew Osmond is the writer of 100 Animated Function Movies. Free! The Ultimate Stroke is accessible within the UK from Anime Restricted.
