What Mix does have in place of beautiful boys with cool hair, chizzled abs, and pretty faces is heart! It carries on the spirit and style of old school sports anime which were the series that influenced your Kuroko’s Basketballs and Yowamushi Pedals.
With that, people have been more to sports series, which of when it comes to baseball Mitsuru Adachi is the master. For years despite being an integral part of the anime and manga landscape even in the big shonen institutions like Weekly Shonen Jump, a vast majority of western fans would deride sports anime on principal alone ‘I’m a nerd so why would I be interested in sports anime? I watch anime to get away from that stuff.’ I think in recent times, with anime’s fandom growing so wide and the medium having more casual watchers than ever, the arbitrary divides being a sports fan or nerd no longer exists. Off the bat, Mix doesn’t have the pop appeal nor the female audience in mind that’s made series like Free!, and Haikyuu, give sports anime a much-needed boost of popularity among English fandom. From start to finish, it’s been an absolute delight. Now over a decade later, we’re finally once again seeing some official English language representation in the form of the Mix anime which is streaming on both Crunchyroll and Funimation.
The last time the west saw some English language Adachi action was with the aforementioned Cross Game Viz Media had put out both the anime and the manga as a big push but unfortunately, the undertaking was met with low sales. However, times are few and far between when western audiences get a chance to be exposed to his stuff either in original manga or anime adaptation form. I titled this piece ‘Mix Proves Mitsuru Adachi Should Be Given A Chance’ but truth be told Mix could be substituted for pretty much any other Mitsuru Adachi title as by and large, they’re all great.