There are two things that I should probably mention here. The first is that I’m not much of a sports guy. I don’t dislike sports per se, and I enjoy watching football and basketball games on occasion, but keeping up with player stats and what kinds of strategies are most effective has always felt like something that requires more time and energy than I care to put in, so I’ve been okay with enjoying them from a distance.
The second is that I’m a big sucker for most sports anime. Now, that might sound like it contradicts the first point, but while I’ve had a hard time getting into sports on the technical level, I have a much easier time getting behind stories about someone’s journey with a particular sport ends up fundamentally changing their life, or how one can bring a group of people with clashing personalities together. Heck, some anime piqued my interest in a sport through sheer enthusiasm. As long as a series can deliver that enthusiasm or have enough elements to compensate elsewhere, there’s no limit to what kinds of stories can be told through sports. I bring all this up because while Tonbo! isn’t an outright terrible show, it fails at making golf feel exciting. It is one of the dullest sports anime I’ve ever seen.
The basic gist of the story here is pretty simple. We follow a man named Igarashi who moves to the remote Tokara Islands for a fresh start following a scandal that ended his pro golf career. There, he meets and befriends a mischievous young girl named Tonbo, who gives him the nickname “Igaiga” and reveals that she has an unusual level of talent for golf. Realizing that she could have a promising career as a pro golfer, Igaiga tries to convince her to leave the island for the outside world, but after losing her parents at a young age and living with her grandfather on the island ever since, she has no intention of leaving.
For most sports anime, what I just described here would probably play out throughout the first one or two episodes before moving onto the real meat of the story, but somehow, all this plays out over its 13-episode runtime. It’s not the worst set-up for a prologue, but it’s not nearly interesting enough of a conflict to justify sitting through for that long. It could have been about a third of the length without losing much of anything.
A slow start could work if the show were good at making golf feel exciting (as much as you really can, anyway), but its biggest problem is in committing what is probably the single gravest sin any sports anime can commit: having a lack of good rivals for the protagonist to square off against, or in this show’s case, almost none at all. Since most of the story here is about whether or not Tonbo will pursue a career in golf, most of the actual golfing is her messing around on the island’s course by herself while Igaiga gives her advice. But since she’s almost always playing alone, it’s hard to get a visual grasp on what exactly sets her apart from other golfers. There are only so many times the story can stop to comment on some unusual technique she’s performing before it gets repetitive. The only time we see her face off against anyone else for this entire season is when one of the other residents brings her niece Tsubara to the island as a way to help inspire Tonbo, but even that fails to be interesting as Tonbo also lacks any competitive spirit and only starts feeling the desire to win after their match ends. It lacks real stakes and feels slightly less boring than Tonbo’s solo escapades.
What really drags this down as a sports anime, though, is how overly technical it is. Golf isn’t the most exciting sport to watch, so series like Birdie Wing and Rising Impact compensated by being as flashy and over the top as possible with their presentation (even if said presentation usually involved overly elaborate golf courses and golfing superpowers). This show goes for a much more realistic approach to golf. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that but said approach often involves every action Tonbo performs being followed up by a lengthy explanation of what made it special. It’s not exactly hard to follow, and it certainly emulates the feeling of listening to sports commentary, but when it comes to actually showing off what’s exciting about the sport, I can’t think of a worse way to do it. I found myself tuning out of it nearly every time.
Now, some of this could be remedied if the show were compensating for it elsewhere since there are plenty of good sports anime where the sport plays second fiddle to character relationships or interpersonal drama (Cross Game or Run with the Wind are some pretty solid examples). Unfortunately, there isn’t much going for it there, either. Tonbo and Igaiga are the only two characters who get any significant focus, and between them, most of it is on Tonbo and her finding the courage to leave the islands and go into the outside world. While her arc isn’t exactly terrible, and the show does enough to get across why she’s so attached to the rest of the islanders, but there’s not enough there to stretch it out over the entire season. Even when we finally reached the climax, I was more glad to see it over with than emotional about Tonbo leaving her friends and family behind.
What doesn’t help is that, while his intentions aren’t malicious, there are points where it feels like Igaiga is more concerned with seeing Tonbo live up to her potential as an athlete than wanting to do what’s in her best interest. While they have a decent enough dynamic, this motivation looming overhead makes it hard to get behind Igaiga’s offer. Igaiga also just isn’t all that interesting, as the most we really get from him beyond his training with Tonbo th his past as a former pro and how he was disgraced when another golfer asked him to fix a match only for the both of them to get caught when Igaiga hesitated not to take a bribe. Aside from that, he’s mostly just here for comedic relief as Tonbo either pulls pranks at his expense, or he fails to understand some aspect of island life that the others are used to. While fish-out-of-water gags aren’t entirely unfunny, there’s only so many times you can do them before they start to wear thin.
We don’t get much out of the rest of the island residents as a supporting cast, and while they’re all likable enough, they mostly function as part of the background rather than as actual characters. The one exception is Tonbo’s grandfather, who tries to steer her towards figuring out how she’s going to manage to live without him when he eventually passes, but even that’s mostly an extension of Tonbo’s arc than anything that actually sets him apart. Beyond that, the most we get from the villagers is towards the end of the show when one of them wants to get married to the island’s nurse, but she’s incapable of having children, and the two of them have to set aside their fears of how their relationship would be judged to have a happy life together. While I did find myself getting pretty drawn into this, the fact that it came near the end of the show only made me wish it could have had more side stories like that with the other islanders. The fact that one of the best things it had on offer had absolutely nothing to do with golf does speak to how badly this fails at being a compelling sports show.
On the technical front, the anime’s production by OLM is acceptable, if largely unimpressive. The show never dips into looking outright bad but lacks any interesting visual direction or flair to help make any of the golfing segments stand out, and it only serves to drag them further down when it comes to making golf look exciting. Some poor subtitle work also hinders the show as it lacks subtitles for any of the on-screen text, and the translation suffers from being a bit overly literal in places, which occasionally results in some clunky sentences that can be a little tough to parse.
The rough localization also extends to its dub. While only one episode of it is legally available on Tubi, that episode left a lot to be desired as it was riddled with awkward pauses, stiff line reads, and performances that sometimes felt like they were barely attempting to match what a character was emoting on screen (that the dub is also entirely uncredited also doesn’t do much to inspire confidence). It’s not exactly unlistenable, but even speaking as a guy who usually defaults to dubs, there’s probably not much reason to check this one out beyond simple curiosity. Since the rest of it isn’t available here in the States for some reason, it’s not even a particularly good accessibility option.
I can’t quite say I hated Tonbo!, but I was pretty bored with it, and in some ways, that makes it more of a letdown. Nothing about it is particularly unpleasant, but it fails to sell the appeal of golf and being a decent sports drama in general. Since this season is more or less just an extended prologue, the series could get more exciting once we see more of Tonbo’s golfing career. But even if it does improve, I don’t know if it’d be worth slogging through all this to get there. There’s no real reason I can think of to go out of the way to watch this one, and with how little it has to offer as a sports drama, you’re probably better off watching an actual golf match instead.
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