marilie65 - 2015-12-19 21:52:20

Damn! Just, damn! I know a lot of us have heard that glorious phrase from Arkada in his reviews, about how the ending is paramount. Well, F just might be a show that really makes me understand why this is. When you get an ending this good, it just makes the whole experience worthwhile. And it was a hell of an experience watching F.

F, or as it's known in Italian, F: Motori in Pista, is a racing anime that follows a royal jackass, Gunma Akagi, as he makes his way towards being a Formula 1 driver. The majority of the series actually focuses on his interactions with his family, friends and drivers and crew for various drivers in the world of F3 racing (and whatever they call the amateur league preceding that). The meat of the story is really a big rivalry between him and the far more interesting Kazuto Hiziri, the driver most likely to actually succeed in the goals that Gunma has set out to achieve. This rivalry is why you should watch this series. There are other side stories and things going one with the cast, and some of them are quite interesting (and some not of course). But when you get to the end, this is all that matters.

The series looks good overall. It's Studio DEEN in the late 80's, which seems to be a decent thing. The style is very reminiscent of Kimagure Orange Road to me, though this seems to have been a fairly common look at the time. It holds up fairly well though, and while you do see some absurdities of logic in the racing scenes, it's not so ridiculous as to be off-putting. This series isn't about the realities of the race most of the time anyways. If you're looking for that, this is not the series for you.

Sound wise, the music is fairly awesome throughout. My only gripes are a couple of great songs getting clipped because a scene ended and the weak second ending theme. The voice acting is very well done though, and you can really feel the passion of the characters through them. This is especially great for Gunma and a couple others who are very vocal characters with a lot of dynamic moments that could have been very bland otherwise.

Now, there is one major downside to this show, for anyone looking to actually check it out. The subs. This series was brought to Italy and dubbed into Italian, which is fine. It must have done decently there. Unfortunately, the only subs available for this are translated over from that original Italian dub. So, while you can get most of the gist of things from this, there are some moments that are a bit awkward because of changes made when it was dubbed into Italian. Also, the subs have a great deal of grammatical errors in them. I personally was able to figure out what they meant through very nearly all of them, but if English isn't your first language, this could be an issue at times. So just keep that in mind. It's really too bad too, because this deserves a better sub job. The show is really worth it overall. If you can deal with mediocre subs, check this one out.