The Wacky Valley that is Birdie Wing: Girls' Golf Story
Light spoilers lie ahead, but it's worth it since you're joining one of the best-kept secrets in anime right now.
Trailer
As you see in all its kira kira-city ⭐, Birdie Wing: Girls’ Golf Story’s trailer is seeping with enough colour to make a good substitute for your torch feature; a feelgood, innocent story of star-crossed rivals. The rebellious Eve and prim, proper Aoi, and the emotional, aspirational tone you’d expect from staff who have worked on shows from Jewelpet Sunshine to Goblin Slayer, Gundam to Code Geass. The cathartic sense of girls challenging each other in principled play in what is an underrepresented sport in the world of anime. A well-made Original, unknown to many but loved by its fandom, pulling in an impressive 7.5 on MAL.
Eve and Aoi coming from different worlds, it’s not always easy to relate to each other when one slums it out in underground golf rings and the other features in a pristine set-up, practically engineered from birth to go pro. All in all, the story can be reduced to an intense drawing together across a world that won’t let them be together, a rainbow in the same way Naruto’s seven-coloured Rasengan is a rainbow, but with the yuri undertones, maybe a little more so. The colours and characters are vibrant and our MCs have their own paths to climb before they get to duke it out truly.
Before the “Girls’ golf story” though, Eve and Aoi, separated by guns, the mafia, robo-like golf courses—an ode to its Gundam influences, Yugioh-like shadow games where to lose means to die, and it’s literally just Birdie Wing left—no one has any clue what it means, apart from some sort of golf reference and a written confession that the creators were certainly flying in the clouds when writing this.
And boy, does their fanbase love them for it.
What the hell?
It’s a feel-good, innocent story of star-crossed rivals. The Kill la Kill reference in the trailer most fans wouldn’t have noticed, the instruction to shoot a hole through your competition was likely lost in translation. Eve’s Blue Bullet golf technique pierces her new rival Aoi, one of the diverse range of girls she’ll make weak in the knees using her 7 different Bullet techniques.
The Yuri subplot is strong indeed; streets you can’t go to and Subreddits you can’t frequent if you say otherwise. And no matter how skilled she is, Eve will always be treated as if she’s from a different world.
So it’s Romeo and Juliet, the campime anime?
Rainbow in the same way that Naruto’s seven-coloured Rasengan is a rainbow, mate.
Fans, staff and Vipères alike all seem to be in on the inside joke - on the ludicrousness of the premise. The characters and memes that spawn from it. Shounen, Shoujo and Yuri fandoms geeking out about sudden-death wagers.
How it all manages to converge here so accessibly; Not staying limited to one genre, and pushing everything that fans love about anime.
Expand your horizons:
That’s one of the core themes of the show. The two rivals don’t let distance stand in the way of battling, even going as far as to face off over augmented reality. It’s where the subversion comes in. They’re fierce rivals as you’d see in many Shounen animes, yet they mesh well together in a market where the norm is establishing who your friends are early, and making the rivals necessarily and narratively evil the typical way to go. Birdie Wing uses friendship as a way to drive rivalry and vice-versa, and has a lot of fun doing it along the way.
Sport:
Birdie Wing’s a sports anime through and through, and it has all the hallmarks of one: Named attacks, “In za zone!”s, technique drawbacks, environmental handicaps and the sense of “I(行)keeeeeee!”—a yell to the heavens for that ball to go just a bit further, to make it into the hole.
Character and development:
A badass, street-smart MC—dresses like Revy from Black Lagoon but without the Rated-R. Cynical but soft to her inner circle. You get to follow Eve who goes from golf as a means of survival, caring for her orphan family to seeing how golf with no shackles is truly liberating.
Vipère is also an example of one of Birdie’s strongest highlights. The anime doesn’t shy away from over-the-top characters; fans will remember the lengths that she goes to win, and yet characters aren’t treated as mere throwaways. For better or for worse, you can expect them to be back.
Music:
If you can imagine humming Hime-hime when Onoda from Yowamushi Pedal races up an incline then you’ll be grinning when Birdie’s Venus Line, sung by Hirose Kohmi, comes on. It’s the sort of iconic song that if someone’s playing it out of the speakers of their car, they’re truly a person of culture.
The first season’s ending song, Nightjar by Tsukuyomi is a song I listen to regularly, capturing a nostalgia, and this bubbling sense of just getting up and doing something with yourself. It perfectly encapsulates the aspirant sense of being split up, divided, and trying to overcome that huge gap. Or at least that’s what it does to me—I can’t speak Japanese.
So what are you still doing here?
If you’re waiting for an exploration of the wackiness, that is better seen rather than heard. Birdie Wing is one of the best-kept secrets in anime right now. It challenges and embraces tropes and stereotypes that we commonly see on our screens. “Guts!” and “Fighting” isn’t just limited to boys, and the colour that stems from really seeing that in action perhaps is a torch on real life, too.
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It makes for a good change to “Is this you? IP: 192.168.0.1 has accessed your location from Tromsø, Norway.” Brighten things up with some anime instead.
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Venus line~!