To be honest, Backflip!! is a tough show to review. Written out, the story sounds like a cookie-cutter post-Free! sports anime, with a young man stumbling into a team of quirky but talented underdogs determined to finally make it to the Big Sports Competition. What sets it apart lies in small details, brief motions, a soaring soundtrack, and slight-but-consequential choices the characters make. All of these add up to make a series that truly is something special, but in a way that is a struggle to describe in words.

When I first started Backflip!!, I was burned out on this particular genre after forcing myself all the way through Skate-Leading Stars and Wave - Let's Go Surfing! Too many sports anime were turning out to be advertisements for buggy mobile games or conceived mainly to push merchandise of the characters. The sports were an afterthought, filled with animation shortcuts or storyboarded in a way that specifically avoided showing more than a few seconds of tricky animation at a time. I didn't want to invest my time or heart into another show like that, so I approached Backflip!! with a great deal of trepidation.

But then I watched the first episode, and when they showed the full four-minute rhythmic gymnastics routine, uninterrupted, it became clear that this was something entirely different. As it turns out, the show wasn't made as a cross-promotion with a dozen other versions on different media, but as a part of a project to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It's set in Iwanuma, a town in Miyagi, the prefecture hit hardest by the quake; their rival team comes from Aomori, a neighboring prefecture with a particularly prestigious men's rhythmic gymnastics team that performed at the 2016 Summer Olympics closing ceremonies. With a background like this, how could Backflip!! be anything but a labor of love?

Sure, the story beats are typical. Shotaro stumbles into rhythmic gymnastics, taking to it easily but worried about whether he's an asset or a liability to his more experienced teammates, most of whom are third years hoping to finally make it to the national Interhigh competition. The other first-year on the team is extremely talented and he's not sure he'll measure up, and the older members are largely stock archetypes, each with their own quirky obsession such as yakuza movies or bonsai plants. They have a powerhouse rival team made up mostly of analogues to their own. When it looks like they've almost made it, there's a crisis that throws their future and ability to compete into doubt. There are absolutely no surprises to be found in the narrative.

Yet somehow, despite Backflip!!'s strict adherence to the formula, it truly comes together into something special, a testament to the skill of the animators and the power of visual storytelling. Yes, Shotaro takes to rhythmic gymnastics surprisingly quickly, but it's easier to suspend disbelief knowing that he's been athletic since he was very young and has just finally found the right sport for him. Yes, Onodera is a typical idol otaku, but flashbacks showing him first with short black hair, then short blond hair, before he reaches his final Pokemon evolution of long blond hair with pink highlights give an impression of how he developed a sense of self and individuality over time. One of the best episodes of the series goes into how their mild-mannered coach became who he is today after sustaining a life-altering injury at the height of his career.

Plus, rhythmic gymnastics is a particularly visually striking sport. On the international stage, it's seen primarily as a feminine sport, with only women competing in large competitions. The male version is much more niche, primarily based in Japan and Spain with little presence elsewhere in the world. It dispenses with the instruments used in the women's version, focusing solely on synchronized bodies moving through space, choreographed to music, artistry existing alongside athleticism. It doesn't require a degree of technical knowledge or outside narration to appreciate like most sports, since backflips, handstands, and throws look impressive no matter how much or little you know about point values or techniques going in.

Perhaps that's why the staff chose to fully animate the competition segments without ever cutting away to commenters on the sidelines, or more obvious labor-saving shots of random air ducts. They're primarily animated using computer graphics, with occasional traditionally-animated close-ups of the characters to highlight their expressions, emphasizing that as effortless as it may look, what they're doing is physically difficult. While it won't satisfy the most ardent haters of CG, there was clearly a lot of effort put in to make them look like bodies with mass affected by gravity.

Outside the competitions, the gymnastics sequences make only light use of CG, instead using highly fluid traditional animation, some of which might or might not have been rotoscoped. Here, too, there is a lot of emphasis placed on weight and motion and just how much work it takes to make their moves look effortless to spectators. Characters don't just spring through the air; they practice, they wobble, they must find their centers of gravity in order to become successful – details that are mostly brought to life using lines and color instead of three-dimensional rendering. Even in the scenes when they're just hanging out or talking, the character acting is precise with an attention to individual detail, making their exaggerated personalities come across as just a little bit more real.

And if what you're looking for is soft boys with exaggerated personalities and the moe they bring you, Backflip!! will serve you well. Few groups know better how to design male characters to be as appealing as possible to a female audience than shojo manga authors, and the team behind Backflip!! enlsted Robico, best known in English for creating the manga My Little Monster, to do the original designs with great success. There's an almost '80s-ish look to them, with big puffy bangs and soft, curving lines. The characters are a lot of fun to spend time with, for all they're stereotypical, and the cast has good chemistry. It's a bit unfortunate that the development isn't really spread evenly – Tsukidate, the bonsai-loving, bespectacled vice-captain, in particular never really gets anything to do.

A perfect metaphor for the overall tone of the show is how it handles lighting. It's rarely dramatic or colorful, but close attention to sources and an extra layer of shading gives a greater sense of depth of field, which adds to the sense of the characters moving through space. It's subtle, but pushes the beauty of the animation to breathtaking at key moments. Nothing about Backflip!! is flashy or new, but the level of care and subtle touches will set it apart if you give it a chance.