Rifle Is Beautiful

Rifle Is Beautiful

Rifle Is Beautiful anime series cover art
Rifle Is Beautiful

Overview

Rifle Is Beautiful (ライフル・イズ・ビューティフル) is actually the Japanese name for this anime. The title is literally just Rifle Is Beautiful spelled out in katakana. However, this series also has an English title, which is Chidori RSC. That’s right, the Japanese title is in English and the English title is in Japanese.

Obviously, Rifle Is Beautiful isn’t proper grammar, which is likely why the English title for the series is different. And, although chidori is a Japanese word, it’s actually the name of the school the girls attend in this series, with RSC standing for rifle shooting club. So, really the English title is in English, it just uses a Japanese proper noun and an acronym.

With the title explanation out of the way, we can finally get into what this series is all about: a school rifle shooting club. But it’s not just any rifle shooting club, it’s a beam rifle shooting club. That basically means they’re using laser tag guns, but shooting at targets.

Obviously there wouldn’t be a high school in Japan with a real rifle shooting club on account of how strict their gun laws are. But, as we learn throughout the series, beam rifles are only the very first step in the rifle shooting ladder. They’re what the beginners use (although that doesn’t mean everyone who competes in the beam rifle events is a beginner).

The next step up is the air rifle competition, which some of the older side characters are explained to be competing in. And we can assume that beyond air rifles are real rifles, although this isn’t a class of competition students would be competing in.

Characters

As this is a cute girls do “cute” things series, all of the characters are female (as they should be). Our main quartet is made up of Hikari Kokura, Izumi Shibusawa, Yukio Igarashi, and Erika Meinohama. I think they’re all first year students.

I’ve said this about a lot of other female protagonists in the past, but Hikari is your stereotypical female protagonist. She’s not the brightest girl around, but she believes in herself, in her friends, and in having fun doing what she loves — which in this case is shooting beam rifles.

Izumi is Hikari’s best friend who decides to start a rifle shooting club with her because she knows Hikari was really looking forward to joining one. The school’s rifle shooting club was disbanded the year prior due to lack of student interest — of course. But aside from that, Izumi is just the “mom friend” of the group.

Erika Meinohama from the anime series Rifle Is Beautiful
Erika Meinohama

Yukio is the most skilled rifle shooter in the club, though you probably wouldn’t guess that by looking at her. She’s short, she’s blunt, and she generally shows no emotion whatsoever. She’s basically like Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but really good at shooting instead of everything else.

And finally we have Erika, who’s a fairly proficient rifle shooter in her own right. Yukio is definitely better, but Erika is generally the second best in the club except for when Hikari’s main character luck boost kicks in. Erika is also the rich, tsundere character, so she’s pretty high tier as far as I’m concerned.

What’s Wrong with Rifle Is Beautiful?

On the surface, Rifle Is Beautiful isn’t any different from the countless other cute girls doing cute, but oddly specific, things. And that’s actually the first problem with the series. Sure, cute girls in a rifle shooting club isn’t something I’ve seen before, but I already knew exactly how it was going to go.

It’s not like these slice of life series really have much variation. I’m not going to spoil the end of this anime directly, but if you’ve seen any other slice of life series where the girls compete in a competition then you probably already know how this one ends.

There’s always the idea that the girls are working really hard for their dreams, but that’s not the only thing they need to succeed. They also need patience, and a lot more practice than what one semester of being in their club provides.

Oh, and all the same basic character types are present too.

Erika, Yukio, Hikari, and Izumi from the anime series Rifle Is Beautiful
Erika, Yukio, Hikari, and Izumi

But now that we’ve established it’s exactly like everything else in the niche, we can explore the real problems it has. And I think the most obvious to a lot of viewers would be its use of CGI. Most of the series isn’t made with CGI, but for some reason the majority of the shooting scenes are.

I get that CGI is used to streamline the animation process and reduce the workload for the more traditional animators, but why would they choose to use it for those scenes? It’s an anime about rifle shooting, so why would you make the rifle shooting scenes look worse than the rest?

Also, the rifle shooting scenes have minimal movement anyway, so what was the issue with animating them without CGI?

And, of course, the other major issue with the series is that it just doesn’t make beam rifle shooting seem fun. The point of these niche cute girls doing cute things series is to make the niche activities seem like fun, but this series completely fails to accomplish that.

Conclusion

Overall, Rifle Is Beautiful (or Chidori RSC, whatever you want to call it) is a 5/10 from me. It has cute girls, and it looks nice most of the time, but it’s not engaging by any means. It’s something to watch if you have nothing else to watch, I guess, but beyond that I wouldn’t really recommend it.

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