TWOCAR

Let's get this quickly out of the way first: Two Car is far from being the best anime of this season. It's far from being original, and it's far from being an actual quality show. Still, it has something that even some shows with better ideas, production-values and fanbase don't: Despite it's numerous mistakes, it's still fun to watch. The story is set on the island of Miyakejima, where does the local Sidecar race called Miyakejima TT take place. Seven teams, each consinsting of two people: driver and passenger , from different High Schools around the area have come to compete. The winner of this eventwill be able to start at one of the most prestigious Sidecar races on the planet, the Man of Isle TT in London. Our main duo: Yuri and Megumi, have their own reasons for wanting to participate in London. Their ex-coach, who originally tought them how to ride the sidecar, decided to pursue his own racing carrer and left them some time ago. Strangely enough, both our main girls are deeply in love with him. Hence they want to go and confess their feelings to him in London TT, where he'll be participating. Sounds pretty weird and cliché, and that's exactly the case. It doesn't really play a role early on, but picks up on importance as the show goes on. And with that, you start to take the show less and less seriously. But of course, there are other teams who would like to win the race and our duo definetly won't have it easy. Don't expect any rivality between the teams themselves tho. Since the sidecar racing is not really popular, and the community is rather small, the teams get along very well together. They help each other, they live in the same inn and they act casually, more like friends than opponents in the race. When there are no problems between the teams, there must be some in them tho. And there are. While introducing the teams and riders, it already becomes clear that not everything is that nice. Some team-mates have their issues with each other, which result in argues and a worse performance in training. During these "fights", we are able to get a glimpses of personality of some characters, or their reasons for racing. Even though these problems come from very childish reasons majority of time, they're fun to watch and the slight addition of drama is positive in my eyes. The characters themselves are however lackluster in every single way. There is just way too many of them for such a short anime, and they're not unique or special in anything. They have some different personalities, but we never get to understand why for example driver A acts mean to driver B, hence their behaving becomes irrelevant as it goes. Atleast some of the duo's work well as a comedy makers, and some of the gags were pretty damn funny to be honest. The racing itself isn't that much of a thing. The character introducing takes a lot of time and the real race comes just in the very last episode. And it's not that great. It lacks any kind of intense entertainment, which is a needed aspect, especially when the race itself is supposed to be the climax of the whole anime. Also the ending was just something you expected from minute 1 and they found a way to fuck it up even more anyway. Overall, I think the Slice of Life tag would fit Two Car more than the Racing tag, and the show thinks that too. The relationships of characters are more important and better presented than the race itself, which was a decent-enough decision, atleast in my opinion. The art of it is.. what you could expect from a low budget show. It's lackluster in a lot of areas, but this being a calm show where nothing much's happening, you won't really notice how much are the scenes lacking. The character desings are also kinda saving it here. Not original, but they still look decent and fit well with my style. Opening of the show is pretty damn good, ending at about average. The soundtrack was almost non-existant during most of it, but there were some good tracks here and there. Atleast with so many characters, a lot of begineer actors can start their carrer. Despite it's numerous mistakes and quality shortages, Two Car still has a fair ammount of entertainment in itself. The show is maybe average or poor in every category, but still works kinda well together. Atleast to the point when I actually wasn't struggeling while watching it. Which is a main indicator of a bad anime for me. The setup isn't that bad, atleast for a sports anime and meanwhile the characters are as bland as they could be, the show does it's best at putting them into interesting situations and relations. ----------- Should you watch Two Car? I honestly don't know. I didn't mind watching it every saturday evening, but god knows what would happen if I would want to marathon it. If you want to take a break from all of the action or shounen's, I guess you could give it a try. But if you're expecting a good sports experience, you're gonna be disappointed. Since the racing parts are actually the show's biggest weakness.

If I had to describe TwoCar in a word, it would be frustrating. While I am happy to see a racing anime that isn't just an angst-ridden teenage boy completing the Shonen Hero quest by car, TwoCar never quite lived up to my expectations with mediocre racing and a sloppy plot. First off, it isn't a racing series the same way Initial D or Capeta is. A lot of the wheel-to-wheel racing was just flat-out mediocre. While the riders made realistic motions, the bike models always looked a size too big for the environments. Initial D figured out how to make decent racing sequences backin 2004, so there's no excuse for this in 2017. TwoCar is really an anime about the riders and it's not successful at that either. The main girls do little more than bicker over a man they can't have, it pretty much hand-waves an abusive relationship, and we know little about the other riders, since the "explore a team's backstory" plot is abruptly dropped halfway through the series. If you're thinking the series reverts to the status quo within one or two episodes, you would be right. The frustrating thing about TwoCar is that every week with a strong episode would be followed up with one or two mediocre episodes which would undo the progress made in a formulaic manner. We open with the main girls Yuri and Megumi fighting, then switch to a team of the weeks' backstory, then back to the present, then to lesbian power couple Mao & Hitomi, then back to the team of the weeks' backstory, before going back to another Yuri and Megumi fight. Roll credits. That about describes the middle block of episodes up until episode 9. It's a damn shame, since there's some good human drama. The teams we do get to see each have their own dynamics between members. There's a nice twist involving the man the main girls are chasing and I loved how the Mao & Hitomi skits would subvert our expectations for anime couples "in love". Still, TwoCar does enough right to justify a >5 score. It respects the craft - it had quite a few clever nods to racing like the twins from Motegi (Twin Ring Motegi circuit) or rolling out the Gulf Racing livery - yet it approached the topic in an accessible manner without being condescending. The engine notes sounded crisp and had the necessary rasp expected from a motorcycle engine. As someone who's well-versed in auto racing but not motorcycle racing, I found it a nice jumping off point to spark my interest in learning more. Credit must be given for the non-racing art - character models are tasteful and well-drawn, plus the backgrounds are lush and do a good job putting a Japanese twist on the Isle of Man TT environments. Bonus points go to picking an actual place where this could theoretically be held - volcanic activity be damned. Ultimately, TwoCar is frustrating because it has the basic ingredients to be "good" but it never quite rises to the occasion. Instead, it chooses to be content with spinning its tires in place. It's a high-6/ low-7 series in my book.

Two Car is about Side Car Racing...........................right? LA was going into Two Car thinking this, rather Two Car is the different relationships that we see just taken to the highs and lows, for the better or worse of them with the Side Car racing taken to to it's most metaphoric form of storytelling between the six other relationships and rivals in Two Car. Two Car's main duo are Yuri Miyata voiced by Aoi Koga and Megumi Meguro voiced by Aimi Tanaka as they want to win their hometown's TT in order for them to truly show their feelings to their coach. So essentially friends turned loveinterests to a coach that has no idea of any of this. The majority of their screentime however is focused mainly on them helping their rivals or bickering...and bickering and bickering over irrelevant stuff. They are both ways the strength and weakness to the entire anime and that's saying something considering they are the main focuses of this anime. That comes into play when we look at the six other rivals. Like Chiyuki Shiohara and Misaki Nagai discourse over how Misaki was recruited and bringing in their dynamic friendship of rich vs. poor into play to Izumi Murata and Nagisa Suzuki's S&M friendship and how that is played with to the Shishido's twins and their essential identity crisis in similar respects to Yuri and Megumi's situation but has more to do with their identity and how that affects both their relationship and romantic situation they were placed in to Mao Katakura and Hitomi Iseki's all-loving and all-knowing (not really) comedic routines. The rest of the rivals....are NOT given this kind of treatment and are treated more as commentators...on speaking of which, Nene Itagaki and Ai Makita being the commentators of the TT also get their own "how they became friend focused episodes all to themselves as well). So all these relationship study development to the characters are all well and good, seeing their trials and tribulations (Izumi and Nagisa being the most interesting while the Shishido Twins' identity crisis was interesting but downplayed due to the twins scthick played rather straight for the most part) but the main focus are Yuri and Megumi and we kinda know who's gonna win let alone what the main focus of this entire anime is so looking at these characters though interesting becomes a practice in patience to actually get to the meat of the anime. In terms of animation by Studio Sliver Link, the animation isn't that bad, from the sparingly used CGI on the side cars to the moeness character designs to be typical in this female-centric anime. There however besides that, there isn't much to say about the animation, it's just "meh" just like the plot format of this anime. Now the voice cast is decent enough, LA just wished alot of the anime wasn't focused on the many many many bickering of the characters, most notably Aimi Tanaka and Aoi Koga are prime offenders. LA was surprised at least by Ayaka Nanase voicing Izumi Murase (who voiced Yoshino Koharu from Sakura Quest) now voicing the sadistic no-holds bar character. The ONLY voice actor LA geniuely liked and brought the spunk to this anime would be.....Sora Tokui as the energetic commentator of the TT, just hearing that "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING MIYAKAJIMA" brings a smile to LA's faces every time..so yeah Sora Tokui was MVP in this voice cast and LA thoroughly liked Ai Makita's backstory as to how she got into commentating. Now that ending...god damn it Two Car!, you could have done something different but typical of a love triangle romance like the characters at the ending kinda said, they go back to square one by the end of it. LA liked the symbolism it did before all this showing us that Yuri and Megumi's friendship wouldn't break so easily even on the tracks but that ending could have cemented it, instead NOPE...status quo is god...-sigh- this was an original work from Sliver Link, they didn't need to do this, making being invested in Yuri and Megumi's trials and tribulations almost worthless!!!...ALMOST. Two Car is by the end of it all, a look into the various relationships one can have through and through and how even these relationship can function through trials and tribulations shown by side car racing. For those motor heads, LA would say that you would be annoyed by the character focused narrative and wanting to see more of the racing and those who wanted to see Yuri and Megumi's friendship last would get quickly annoyed by their bickerings that you wouldn't care and would like to focus on another of their rivals instead....however even then the rival's screentime becomes moot due to Yuri and Megumi being main characters and being kinda the focus of this anime. So LA really doesn't know who this anime is trying to appeal to?. Two Car is a narrative mess of trying to appeal it's common demographic (be it the subtext yuri fanservice that duped LA into getting into this anime or side car racing also LA getting duped as LA wanted to see another Bakuon!) and not focusing...on it's main focus of Yuri and Megumi's battered friendship over a dumb romance, worst yet bailing and staying on the safe side by the finale of it all and that really grinded LA's gears... By all means LA doesn't see Two Car as the worst anime of Fall 2017 let alone for 2017, but this anime has it's problems and it like Yuri and Megumi loves to run away from it's problems and that isn't helping anyone... Two Car needs an a "plot intervention" is what it needed...

Two Car is a sidecar racing anime following the the high school duo Yuri and Megumi as they race against fierce rivals in order to make it to the Isle of Man. Or at least it would have you think. Instead, we are given a rather episodic show where they would follow the formula of introducing a team and presenting a problem they may have that prevents them from competing in top form. The next episode would then have them solve their problem while improving their bond with each with the help of our power couple, who ironically hate each other (or at least that'swhat they say. In reality, they have a pretty decent relationship as rivals in love and partners on the racetrack.) The races are a side thought, and instead could be thought of a metaphor for how each pair's relationship is currently doing with their performance getting better once they have solved their problem, but sadly most of them are in the same position as before they even had a problem which makes it questionable if any of this meant anything. Even worse is our power couple, Yuri and Megumi improving from the frustration they have with each other and toward anything that may be a nuisance to them. To make matters worst, all character development that occurs for our two protagonist is instantly dropped during the last few minutes to keep everything at status quo. Story: Terribly boring as nothing is really happening for the most part except for the racers to work out their problems that doesn't really contribute to anything and practice racing for the qualifiers that happens at the end of the series. Art: It's pretty average and run-of-the-mill. I heard it was supposed to be Silver Link.'s 10th anniversary anime, but it is honestly nothing special to look at. Sound: Nothing too memorable except for the final insert that plays during the actual race. Motor sounds were okay I guess. Enjoyment: Initially I was pretty excited to see some racing with this sidecar gimmick as it had looked quite interesting in the trailer, but sadly my expectations were not met. I will admit that it was quite enjoyable at times, but as a whole, absolutely terrible. Characters:Our main characters were okay, as it was interesting to see their hatred drive them to victory along with the unexpected best duo Hitomi and Mao who have short scenes almost every episodes where they will do some type of gag involving their love toward each other. Overall, I would not recommend this and would advise anyone who is interested to stay away. If you're looking for a CGDCT anime, they're a plethora of others that can at least be mildly amusing or short enough to make for a quick watch where you can be braindead. Score: Two (Car)/ Ten