Baby Steps

Diligent and methodical honor student Eiichirou Maruo decides to exercise more during the little free time he has available because he is worried about his health. For this reason, after seeing a flyer, he s the Southern Tennis Club at the beginning of his freshman year.

During his free trial at the club, he meets Natsu Takasaki, another first year student, who is determined on becoming a professional tennis player due to her love for the sport. In contrast, Eiichirou's study-oriented life exists because he believes that it is what he has to do, not because he enjoys it. However, his monotonous days come to an end as the more he plays tennis, the more he becomes fascinated by it.

Baby Steps is the story of a boy who makes the most of his hard-working and perfectionist nature to develop his own unique playing style. Little by little, Eiichirou's skills begin to improve, and he hopes to stand on equal footing with tennis' best players.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Maruo, Eiichirou Main

Murata, Taishi Japanese

Takasaki, Natsu Main

Kotobuki, Minako Japanese

Ike, Souji ing

Hosoya, Yoshimasa Japanese

Egawa, Takuma ing

Namikawa, Daisuke Japanese

Nabae, Yuu ing

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Fukazawa, Yukichi ing

Shimono, Hiro Japanese

Miyagawa, Takuya ing

Kakihara, Tetsuya Japanese

Oobayashi, Ryou ing

Maeno, Tomoaki Japanese

Miura ing

Kusunoki, Taiten Japanese

Kageyama, Kojirou ing

Terashima, Takuma Japanese

Murata, Masahiko Director

Takakuwa, Hajime Sound Director

Murayama, Kiyoshi Episode Director

Matano, Hiromichi Episode Director

Reviews

Jan 1, 2015

Compete

Recommended

To be completely honest, I can’t begin to comprehend the lack of popularity surrounding Baby Steps. The title Baby Steps may often make people prolong watching this sensational series or even drop it completely. Baby Steps art style can push people away from watching it, but once you get past the art style you will be be engaged in this show.

I will not go into full detail of the story, and will try to make this review nice and short.

This series is typically about an honour student Maruo Eiichirou, (also called Ei-chan for his exceedingly high grades) and he is living an unhappy life. ... A life of studying, to make his parents happy. But what this really making him happy? He decides to take up tennis, with having no prior experience in sport whatsoever. This is when his love for tennis, started to begin. It is also really provoking to see how, Maruo takes notes in his practices and how he involves his studying and note-taking into his matches. This is such a different character, to what we are used to seeing and Maruo’s potential as he trains and takes notes is infinite.

Story 10/10:
Baby Steps does not follow the routine of every other cliché sports anime. It is such a rarity that you come across an anime with such an engaging story and cliffhangers that make you rushing to finish the next episode. As Maruo starts to play tennis, he finds that his lack of fitness is making it hard for him to improve and get better. He trains indefinitely to improve just hitting the tennis ball at first and then he gradually gets better as his fitness level rises. Baby Steps does a really good job engaging its audience, by taking a realistic approach on a sports anime. Maruo does not have super-human powers and gets professional instantly. You watch him grow on his journey from becoming a straight A student, to a person who finds ion in his life, that he never knew he has before.

Art 8/10:
Has anyone ever told you to not judge a book by its cover? The same thing can be said for Baby Steps. The art style for it can often be misunderstood and make people score this series a lot lower score than it deserves. Once you get used to the different approach on the art, then you will sure be in for a surprise!

Characters 9/10:
Baby Steps does a magnificent job portraying all of the different characters, especially the relationships between Maruo, and his classmates and family. As this is a slow pacing anime, do not get turned off if it takes a while until you feel engaged. After every episode there are only more positive things to come and as you are watching Maruo grow as a tennis player he also grows fundamentally as a person in all aspects. The relationship between Maruo and his mother also grow throughout the series, as she sees how much Maruo is enjoying his studies and has finally found a hobby that peaks his interest.

Sound 8/10:
The soundtrack in Baby Steps is not “ sensational “, but the sound does a great job in adding different atmospheres in certain situations. The opening song “ Believe in Yourself “ by Mao Abe fits the series just perfectly. It reinforces the idea that even though Maruo had never held a tennis racket before in his life, the amount of dedication and love that he had found for this sport would astonish, not only those around him, but himself as well. The soundtrack fulfils its job well as setting the mood and tone in various settings. It can make a regular tennis match turn, intense and thought provoking in a matter of seconds.

Overall 10/10:
I highly recommend this Anime to not only people who enjoy watching sports anime, but to everyone as well. Baby Steps takes a very different approach on a sports anime, and it deserves more recognition for how well the series went.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 4, 2025

YBYUVI

Mixed Feelings

Love the anime, it's a really good anime, the story is top tier, and the characters are written very well. But the only thing is that the matches in this anime are super annoying, I mean if you are watching this anime you probably have already watched Haikyuu, so imagine haikyuu match but they never actually show the dang court and just speak volleyball jargon. Like blud show me the damn court, I don't know what a frickin slice, or cross shot or any of that stuff is, and the main thing that if the matches are going to last 2 episodes I just don't ... wanna see him or the opposite player just give a monolgue, I also wanna see the dang match like the audience in the anime. Becuase it's just not fun someone just explaining what they are doing in the match and not actually seeing what they are doing. Other than that the anime I would reccomed you give the anime a try.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jul 30, 2016

Camkitsune

Not Recommended

Preliminary (11/25 eps)

I really did try to like this series...

The single best thing about Baby Steps is Eiichirou, the central protagonist: great lengths are taken to establish that outside of his one talent, his skill comes entirely from analysis and excessive amounts of repetitious practice. While in interactions he comes across as somewhat bland, he doesn't strain suspension of disbelief the way one might expect, because of how much time he spends practicing. This reminded me a great deal of the title character from History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi, which in my opinion does this kind of underdog story a lot better.

Aside from him, Takuma is ... the only other character that really stands out in the core cast; while he falls squarely into the 'rival with the troubled past' archetype, he serves as an interesting take on it, as his principal character flaw is quickly established as being his lack of motivation. Every other character is too stock to really care much about.

Not helping this is the pacing: Ei's first match starts in episode 4, and gets wrapped up in episode 5. This is the first time that the series actually has any kind of dramatic stakes. Suffice it to say that the series thoroughly undercuts these by skipping over large chunks of the match, including what should have been a climactic ending. The second major conflict doesn't come around until episode TEN. Almost all of this time is spent either on Ei training, bland characters trying to banter with eachother, and, of course, gratuitously reusing footage.

It's this last one that finally made me drop the series. Episode 9 has a flashback to establish Ei's opponent's backstory (he's the 'I was only able to learn how to do one thing so I learned how to do it really well' archetype). Episode 10 reuses the ENTIRE FLASHBACK. Every episode starts with at least a solid minute clipped from the end of the previous episode, almost never edited, so that every episode is really only 15 minutes or so long once you cut out the opening and ending. Large chunks of these are devoted to either scenes of Ei practicing - sometimes of the cast will provide commentary about how much potential Ei has - throwaway interactions between the characters that don't really help to give them more character, and occasionally a legitimately interesting bit of Tennis. Repeated short scenes are given to showing that Ei's grades are starting to suffer - and by 'repeated', I mean 'several more after the point has already been made'.

This isn't helped by the art style, which I intensely dislike. The characters have eyes that are half the size of their face and eyebrows that would be in the middle of a normal person's forehead, several people look like someone used a Mii as a reference, and the animation quality is nothing to write home about even at the best of times. The music only stood out to me on the occasions that it sounded alarmingly close to something one might hear in Wii Sports which coupled with the character designs made me wonder if I weren't having some kind of fever-dream after ing out during the tennis minigame.

The series has potential, but - ironically enough - its insistence on repetition buries it under a massive blanket of monotony.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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