Kuroko’s Basketball
“It is the Best Present”, Season 3 Episode 26
Requested By
What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s clearly an anime series based on the title and artwork, but I’ve never heard of it.
Recap
An old man reads a letter as wistful music plays. There’s a photograph inside of a group of teenagers.
Elsewhere, pink-haired teen explains to dark-haired teen that there will be a meetup of “the Generation of Miracles”, where they will – of course – play basketball. She explains that it’s in honor of Tetsu’s birthday.
Blue-hair and Brown-hair are walking down the street. Brown-hair asks Blue-hair if he’s free on the 31st. He says no. But immediately Blue-hair gets a phone call inviting him to something else, also on the 31st, and this time he says yes. Brown-hair is flustered: didn’t you just tell me you weren’t free? A bit of explanation follows: Blue-hair is the titular Kuroko, the 31st is his birthday, and the phone call invited him to a reunion of the “Teiku” teammates. Eventually they compromise on holding a birthday party after the basketball game.
Pink-hair and two others discuss how to get others to show up for the party. Her real name is Satsuki, and she calls up “Mukkun”. The way to Mukkun’s heart is through his stomach: she offers him a snack made of Sakura shrimp and powdered foie gras. He’s interested at first, until she lets slip that this isn’t a purchased snack but something she’s going to make herself. Evidently her lack of cooking prowess is legendary, and he turns it down; he doesn’t want to shlep all the way to Tokyo just for a street basketball game, old Teiku teammates or no.
More people are inviting more people, and I’m losing track of how many characters there are.
Green-hair is warned by a TV horoscope he’d better bring dried mushrooms if he goes outside today. He steps outside the door, sees a black cat, and freaks out, calling a friend to get him dried mushrooms right away.
Pink-hair (now named Momoi) and two others meet on the basketball court and are surprised when Kuroko (with blue hair) shows up behind them.
I see. Tetsu and Kuroko are the same person. Tetsu might be a pet name, or one of those is his surname. That might also be the case with Satsuki/Momoi.
Green-hair arrives with his dried mushrooms, and gives Kuroko a keychain with a baby chick on it, which is what the TV horoscope says he will need.
Akashi, burgundy hair, arrives. He deliberately scheduled a practice game between two other teams in the area to ensure that another member of the team would happen to be in the area and show up.
The game begins and green-hair (named Midorima) immediately scores from center court at the jump ball.
There’s a montage of epic shots and epic music, during which blond-hair is shocked that Midorima passed the ball to him (or at all). I also realize that the man reading the letter at the start must be a future version of one of these characters – probably Kuroko - reminiscing about the events of this day.
They play into the night. No, wait, that’s just a stylistic thing; turns out it’s still day. Pink-hair watches the boys play from the sidelines, for some reason crying, until she is asked to play as well. One of the players refer to her as the manager (though of the team or of his personal career, I’m not sure).
Meanwhile, a group of other people are preparing the surprise party for Kuroko. Somebody comes in late, having gotten lost on the way and rescued by “Takao”, whom everyone else is surprised and not necessarily pleased to see.
Pink hair takes a photo of the group, and it’s the photo we saw at the beginning. She promises to send a printed copy to Kuroko, which he calls “the greatest present”.
As arranged, after the basketball game Kuroko goes to his birthday party, with the rest of the team. Everyone else is starstruck: “You brought the entire Generation of Miracles team with you?”
Yet a third group of people arrive. There are a lot of reactions, surprise or shock or horror or excitement at one another’s presence at the party, but it’s too quick for me to follow.
The credits are a freeze-frame gallery of things people said at the party. Green-hair asks what happened to his dried mushrooms; another character says he put them in the food to add flavor. Green-hair is furious: he needs those to prevent some disaster today! (But what if the disaster to be averted was that of an unflavored dish?)
Unresolved questions
If I am correct that the man at the beginning was old Kuroko, who wrote the letter? Did pink-hair wait decades to send it? Or has he kept it in pristine condition all these years?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 1/10. Only two events took place in the entire half-hour; this is simply not a plot-based episode. That’s not a criticism, though, because it’s not intended to be one. It’s supposed to be a showcase all of the people important to Kuroko at this stage of his life, using reminiscence of his birthday as a framing device.
Writing: 7/10. For an episode about an eventless birthday, this was very well executed. The focus is clear enough: 1) bringing the band back together to play basketball; and 2) putting all of Kuroko’s friend groups in the same room and seeing them react to each other.
I was initially surprised at #1. Surely the finale of a series about basketball would feature The Most Important Game of Their Lives? But instead they’re playing for fun on a street court, with rotating teams, and the episode didn’t care at all who won. Which is, in context, unquestionably the right decision. Elderly Kuroko probably doesn’t remember himself who won, he just remembers the games.
As for #2, those character interactions all went over my head. I have no idea who any of these people are or what their relationship is with Kuroko. But I recognized it despite not understanding it.
Production: 6/7. The animation was of rather higher quality than other anime series that I’ve seen.1 In particular there was one shot of the basketball net, waiting for the ball to arrive, during which I actually said “wow” out loud.
There was one amusing animation layout mistake:
It’s harder to judge the voice acting. This is the first foreign-language finale that I’ve reviewed, so I wasn’t used to taking notes and trying to learn about thirty new characters while reading subtitles. As a result, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to absorb whether the voice actors were doing a good job.
Had I known in advance that this would be a problem, I’d have practiced with one or two other anime series first. So, with apologies to the reader who requested this episode, I’m leaving the voice acting unjudged, and scoring production out of 7 instead of out of 10.
Characterization: 8/10. As always, I give the series the benefit of the doubt wherever I see evidence of good character work, even if it isn’t a big part of the episode itself. I saw a lot of depth in how the different ‘slices’ of Kuroko’s life interacted with one other at the birthday party. I have no idea who was who, but the way the characters reacted when they saw each another (surprise, pleasure, shock, dismay, etc.) seemed to reflect long-standing interactions and a complex history. You could tell they knew each other, even if you don’t know them at all.
Accessibility: 3/10. This finale was almost designed in a lab to confuse me. It’s animated, so it’s harder to distinguish faces; there was no plot, so I couldn’t distinguish characters based on their actions; and the purpose of the episode was to bring together literally everybody in Kuroko’s life, flooding me with too much information to absorb all at once.
All I can do is thank the anime penchant for giving people bizarre-colored hair; when you get overloaded with characters and thus forget their names, even after hearing them multiple times, you still have hair color to fall back on.
But I’m still sure I made mistakes in the synopsis above, switching characters’ names and hair colors.
Closure: 6/10. This leans slightly into more closure than less closure, because bringing every major and minor character together for one last goodbye is a classic path for a finale to take. But it was for a birthday party - not the most major life-changing event. Most plotless “reunion”-style finales surround a more momentous event in a character’s life, such as a wedding or graduation. A birthday would be more appropriate to close out a season than a series; perhaps they didn’t know the series was being canceled.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I’m certain the episode was unrepresentative of the series. The characters that greeted each other clearly had a history together, so there must have been a plot in previous episodes. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing what that plot was about, so I have no way to judge whether I’d be interested in it.
It’s been about ten years since I regularly watched anime; luckily, the series is about ten years old, so I’m comparing it to its contemporaries.