Princess Nine

Melissa and I just finished watching Princess Nine, the anime series about an all-girl baseball team competing within an all-boy league, "not in a league of their own" as the description on the back cover cleverly asserts. When we saw the trailer on the Nadia discs, we were sucked in by the ultra-cute opening to the title sequence.

The series is unabashedly in the shojo genre, with its focus on schoolgirls becoming young women as the baseball season forces them to look past the typical teenage world. The animation isn't anything special, and you could argue that each member of the team simply embodies a particular personality, whether it's the "bad girl" or the starlet in the making.

But none of that matters once you get into the compelling story. The series focuses on Ryou Hayakama, whose late father was a famous pitcher. Ryou, the virtuous innocent, has inherited his pitching ability, and she gets recruited by Katagiri Girls' School to head up and recruit for the new team.

To my mind, the most complex character is Izumi Hirumo, the star tennis player who eventually joins the baseball team as their best hitter. She's maniacally driven; she hits Ryou's high-speed pitches only after spending all night practicing and getting bruises and cuts all over her hands. That obsessiveness translates into a cold-hearted mean streak, but that ferocity often disguises a caring heart that Izumi clearly isn't comfortable with. Her seemingly mean directives often help her teammates over a psychological hurdle. She considers Ryou a rival: for the school's attention, for Izumi's mother's time, but most importantly for the heart of Hiroki Takasugi, the champion hitter for the Katagiri Boys' School. Most of the time you'll hate Izumi, but Melissa and I whooped out loud when she transformed one team's dirty-trick pitch into a totally unorthodox hit that only she could pull off. And her rivalry with Ryou makes their final scene even more touching.

The series builds to an obvious showdown between the girls' school and the boys' school, with the final climactic moment resolving the love triangle between Ryou, Izumi, and Hiroki. Along the way, we learn a lot about each character's past, and the other members of the team find their strengths and come together in a way none of them imagined. We cried, we yelled in triumph, we laughed. And we were sad when the last ninth inning ended the show.