Farewell to Farewell:

Farewell, my dear Cramer has a problem inherent to animating soccer.  It's impossible to animate soccer.  Everyone on the field is in constant motion for hours straight.  There's always something happening so you can never look away.  That is the beauty and the glory of soccer, there are no game stoppages.  How many frames of animation would it take to actually animate a fictional soccer game?  More than the combined animation of all anime across Japan's history.

So the series instead does a bunch of close-ups to girls' heads as they think about what's going on, a bunch of still frames or people bobbing up and down repetitively pretending to run.  It doesn't capture the excitement of soccer at all.  It doesn't capture the ebb and flow or how many players contribute to every situation.  Soccer is always eleven-on-eleven, the positioning of the players without the ball affects how you can cover the guy with the ball.  Zooming in to the confrontation between one defender with the dribbler doesn't actually convey what's going on in a soccer game.

Contrast this with baseball.  Baseball anime works beautifully because all they really have to animate is the pitch and the batter's swing.  Sometimes they even skip the swing and just show the result, a still frame of the ball in the pitcher's mitt and the bat too high or low.  99% of the time in a baseball game everyone from both teams is standing still.  So animating a show about people standing still and thinking about what happened or what will happen next in a baseball game is completely natural.

Ginga E Kickoff somehow managed to pull off a decent soccer anime, but they had a much higher animation budget than Cramer.  In addition the art style is much better than Cramer.  And on top of that even Ginga E Kickoff reduced the players on the field to 8 on 8 to make things easier on themselves.  Even with all that going for it Ginga E Kickoff is only 179th in my rankings.

Soccer is great, but it isn't suited to anime.  You should make it a live action and film actual players actually moving.  It costs nothing extra to film lots of people running around in live action, but in anime that's prohibitive.  A soccer drama would still probably be inferior to an actual soccer game, though.  So maybe people should just go watch soccer on tv.  I know I'm looking forward to the soccer of the Tokyo Olympics now only months away.

Sayonara, Watashi no Cramer is dropped before the three last spring series even debut.  So sad.