Free! Iwatobi Swim Club

The big thing in this season's anime: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club. Full of swimming and pretty boys. I was hesitant to review this one despite all the fuss it's kicked up but I have succumbed to peer pressure! The plot is very straight forward: pretty boys swim togethers and never wear tops.
Ok, so it's not that straight forward. Haruka, Nagisa, Rin and Makoto all have two things in common: they all have feminine names and love to swim. In fact the four were very close in their elementary swim club and won a relay race in a tournament before the four went their seperate ways. Makoto and Haruka stay together in highschool but later meet up with Rin and Nagisa. But Rin's cold nature towards his three friends convince the boys to set up a new swim club at their school: the Iwatobi Swim Club. With new recruit Rei (another boy with a feminine name) they decide to enter a swimming tournament to be able to swim alongside Rin. But actually it's just an excuse to have lots of pretty shirtless boys.
I can't deny it's well made though. Despite being a terribly plain plot about a sport I don't care about, they still build a lot of excitment. Because in reality it's not an obvious plot, I can't predict who will win, which I find to be an incredibly rare trait, so for that alone I'll give Kudos. But after the excitment wears off I feel a sensation of guilt. Why am I enjoying an anime about sport? Why do I care about swimming? It's simple really: they are exploting the sport. I'm surprised actual fans of swimming haven't complained because the producers clearly don't care about swimming. They are exploiting the muscular, shirtless young swimmers. It's a clever ploy which took note of how popular Prince of Tennis was (same concept, different sport) but by using a more attractive looking sport, it has teenage girls across the globe excited - including me - without knowing much about the sport.
As with any anime based around pretty boys, the personalities of the characters are very important. Different people have  different ideals and the characters in the anime need to satisfy as many of these as possible to suceed. But this show only has 5 characters to milk.
Haruka is the lead character and yet I feel he is decisivly lacking. Sure he has the toned body and an adorable obsession with swimwear, but there isn't much else there! He's a very inward character and only Makoto can understand him. He acts erractically and out of character sometimes the only consistency he has is that he is always the boring one! This is a major flaw for a bishounen (pretty boy) anime and yet it does not appear to have effected the shows popularity at all.
The other characters, however, do fill a lot of the sought after cliches. Makoto is Haruka's best friend and also the swim team captain. He is unrealistically kind and always puts others before himself - I'm sure I don't need to explain why that makes him desirable. Then there's Rin: the tortured soul of the group. His "tragic" backstory and misunderstood cruelty is perfectly balanced to bring out the viewers maternal instinct to nurture and care for him. Although, I'm not sure why he has fangs... Seriously, he has shark teeth or something! Finally, with his blonde hair and feminine ways Nagisa is probably the most cliched of them all! He is only a year younger than Haruka and Makoto but he acts like he is 5! He's exactly like Hunny from Ouran High School Host Club or (for a more recent example) Nai from Karneval. It's an old formula, but it works. It's just, not a very novel group in all honesty.
There's also the design. I've already mentioned Rin's teeth and Nagisa's hair, but I haven't discussed there mostly visible bodies. The muscle definition through out the show is unlike anything I've ever seen. I can't tell you how natural they look, but the amount of detail is impressive nonetheless. There is also a lot detail in the swimming scenes, I for one especially loved the POV scenes which really immersed (no pun intended) you in the moment. Water is always a hard thing to animate, but I am moderatly impressed with how they pull it off. Having said that, I usually do enjoy Kyoto Animation's cute yet fluid style.
So this anime has a very clear target audience in mind (young teenage girls) and has little to appeal to viewers outside of that range. That is going to cost it some pie. But I can't argue that it does what it does well! It was an ingenious idea to combine bishounen and swimming to easily fill it with fanservice. Also, I cannot forget that this anime still has some unpredictability.

Pie: