This current anime season definitely feels light in the “cute girls doing cute things” department. One show to quench your thirst for cuteness is Rifle is Beautiful — the story of Hikari Kokura, a 1st-year high school student with a love for the sport of target shooting. She has the lofty goal of one day shooting in the Olympics. The anime is an adaptation of a 4koma series by Akki Sarumi that is serialized on the Shueisha’s Tonari no Young Jump website. It’s being animated by Studio 3Hz.
Wanting to join the school’s rifle club, Hikari is distraught when she learns it has been disbanded due to a lack of members. It can be saved if she can find four members to join. Hikari and Izimi Shibusawa, Hikari’s best friend and walking source of rifle trivia, then run into twin-tailed tsundere Erika Meinohama who formerly lost to Hikari at their last shooting tournament. The quiet and mysterious Yukio Igarashi who was the winner of said tournament Hikari and Erika were competing in then finds the group and the search for the four rifle club members is quickly completed.
The main plot point of finding club members, which spans multiple episodes in other shows, ends up being resolved within the first five minutes. The rest of the episode is focused on the four girls getting to know each other, while partaking in various activities such as their first shooting session, trying out shooting uniforms, or shopping for snacks (a scene seemingly added on behalf of some of the food companies sponsoring the show.)
These activities are interspersed with random bits of shooting trivia, such as the material of shooting uniforms or the rules of competitive rifle shooting. One important thing to note is the girls use beam rifles that use electronics rather than rifles that fire bullets. People going into the show expecting it to be about gun appreciation and gun facts are going to be sorely disappointed. The show seems to be based more on the sport itself rather than the firearms that are used in it. An odd choice given that the title of the show would give people the impression that there would be some admiration of a rifle’s beauty.
Despite its focus on a unique sport that has not been the focus of any other anime, there is not much to set Rifle is Beautiful apart from its contemporaries. The girls are cute and their antics will get a few chuckles, but they are still not very different from other characters from past series. Regardless, the show has the potential to diversify itself and, hopefully, target shooting becomes more involved than being just a backdrop for the girls to do the same things other girls do in other shows.
Like guns but want something dark and gritty with a gruff and manly protagonist? Check out No Guns Life also airing this season.
