Winter 2023 Anime: Ippon Again!

Synopsis

Michi Sonoda decides to quit judo after her last tournament match in middle school, hoping to live a more carefree high school life without club activities. Her schoolmate from middle school, Anna Nagumo, is set to take this opportunity to get Michi to join the kendo club instead. But when Michi finds that her last tournament opponent, Towa Hiura, has attended the same high school and wants to be in the judo club with her, it could be the spark that lights up Michi’s affection for judo again.

Comments

Halimun Muhammad (The Indonesian Anime Times)

A flashback to a judo match in Planet With has convinced me that judo anime can be a thrilling watch. While there have been some judo anime in the past, it’s still nice to have a new TV series coming out. Ippon Again! adapts Yū Muraoka’s sports manga of the same name that is still being serialized in Weekly Shonen Champion, a magazine that, while not as popular as Jump, is one of the older weekly shonen magazines and has had a number of pretty popular anime adaptations in recent times like Yowamushi Pedal, Beastars, Iruma-kun, and The Vampire Dies in No Time.

The judo matches use a mix of animated drawings, slow motions, still shots, and close-up shots to capture the intensity of physical contact between the characters as they perform various techniques (waza) to throw the opponent off-balance, or to resist getting off-balance. The dramatic throw Michi performs at the climax of the episode that sets her course back to re-embrace judo is also heightened by the compositing that gives the impression of camera movement through three-dimensional depth.

The adaptation is rather conservative in bringing the manga content to the screen, barring a handful of added visual jokes such as the clever use of race track signal lights backdrop prior to Nagumo and Towa pulling Michi in a tug-of-war for club membership. The use of floating heads to indicate characters who are speaking off-screen is not necessarily a bad option, but the way they are integrated into the cuts are too plain. Still, as long as the show can consistently offer intense judo matches, I’m still happy to see it (but hopefully, there would be more creative additions like the aforementioned signal lights gag to be seen too).

Watch Ippon Again! on Muse Asia YouTube channel.

Facts and Figures

Screenshots and Trailer

The Indonesian Anime Times