Forum - View topicBuried Treasure - Aim for the Ace!
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SDS
Posts: 9 |
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Aim for the Ace! is a wonderful series in all of its forms. It really is like distilled shoujo.
One important thing to note is that the anime has a slightly different feel to it than the manga, though it's still very much shoujo. This probably has to do with the Dezaki-Sugino combo, but I have nothing to verify that. |
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leongsh
 Posts: 181 |
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A worthy gem of an anime to write about. It's a pity that Justin couldn't get his hands on the TV series.
Aim for the Ace (Ace wo Nerae) is a classic shoujo sports and romance drama that does try to keep the sport closer to reality rather than the abomination known as Prince of Tennis (Tenisu no Ojisama) which mangles the sport of lawn tennis beyond reason. That Ace wo Nerae can do a decent job with the portrayal of the sport and still provide a highly engaging drama is an object lesson. I noted that there are a few posts looking for an excellent baseball anime. Please get your hands on Touch. It has been featured before by Justin in Buried Treasure (link). Princess Nine pales in comparison to the bona fide classic that is Touch. |
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bci110
 Posts: 391 |
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Touch has been on my R1 wishlist ever since Justin posted his article about it. But being an older series, I seriously doubt that it'll receive an R1 license anytime in the forseeable future. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4622 |
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I've heard that the baseball-themed series Major is also supposed to be rather good.
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Tofusensei
Posts: 365 |
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FYI, both the TV anime series and drama series were fansubbed and are pretty easy to find.
-Tofu |
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Teriyaki Terrier
 Posts: 5689 |
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If anyone is looking for an excellent sports series, I recomend Eyeshield 21.
The anime is all right, but I presonally enjoy the manga much more. Another great sports manga series is Rookies. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14808 |
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Including tennis, I play lots of sports (basically my motto is, if there's a ball in it, I'll try it), and sports anime (for general audience) always make me laugh because stuffs happen that couldn't happen. 
Somebody referred me Aim for the Ace when Gunbuster got here, but the former wasn't available then. Heck, I haven't even finished my DVDs of Princess Nine and only seen a few Touch a long while ago when characters started dying. Dunno how AnimEigo is promoting Yawara to an otaku audience.
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petran79
 Posts: 122 |
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Bah,,,,the best one is Treasure Island. The French Collectors Edition with Japanese/French audio and subs at least. What great titles did I miss in my childhood! |
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 389 Location: Florida |
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I always attribute the lack of popularity for sports anime among US anime fans to the fact that not enough people realize that the "sports anime" formula is basically the precursor to the modern "shonen action/adventure" one. Attend any convention and you'll see firsthand that anime fans aren't exactly known for playing sports, and so I think it's essential that people drive home the point that you don't need to know about or even care about the sport in question in order to watch and greatly enjoy a sports anime.
Right now, it seems that the only group still watching sports anime in any signficant quantity is the fujoshi looking to make yaoi pairings. I for one know zero male fans of Prince of Tennis, an allegedly shonen show. I bet this is all Slam Dunk's fault. Heck, the modern "shonen" formula owes much to that and Saint Seiya, whose fanbases are largely female. So it is that for lack of knowledge of a better term, I personally have decided to invent a whole new word to describe these shonen shows that are intentionally designed to also appeal to girls: "neo-shonen." That's not a pejorative term or anything: I myself dig One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist, but they sure as heck aren't "shonen" the way Violence Jack is! To date, this neo-shonen designation is one used only by me, but I may as well throw the idea out there. Oh right, Ace wo Nerae!: shojo in general doesn't interest me, but 1970s shojo is so super girly it circles all the way around to being super manly. Aim for the Ace is a great example with its insane backgrounds, camerawork, and theme songs confidently declaring "Serve! Smash! Volley! Do your best!" This level of melodrama is typically reserved for when someone's about to climb inside their combining robot and blast the Dinosaur Empire back to the center of the Earth from whence they came. Still, I hesitate to refer to Aim for the Top: Gunbuster as a "parody" of Aim For the Ace. It's not exactly spoofing or making fun of it. Rather, the three main characters are more or less identical to the ones from Aim for the Ace: instead of Coach repeatedly smashing Hiromi in the face with tennis balls as he yells at her, Coach repeatedly makes Noriko do robot manuevers as he yells at her. While they certainly turned out quite different from one another, you can practically envision Gainax thinking "let's make something like Aim for the Ace as far as characters and how they relate...only with ROBOTS!" as the impetus to make Gunbuster. Deep down in your hearts, all of you know that the greatest Dezaki/Sugino teamup was The Professional: Golgo 13. Last edited by Anime World Order on Thu May 29, 2008 2:14 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Grico
 Posts: 201 Location: Fort Wayne, IN |
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Being a big fan of the original Gunbuster, I am somewhat interested in this series. I do tend to prefer shojo, so I guess there is a possiblity I would like this series. The basic plot does sound as generic as humanly possible though.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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I've seen a few but they were cosplaying solely for the prospect of bagging fangirl ass at conventions. A sad, sad world we live in, truly. |
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cool3865
 Posts: 770 Location: Austin, TX |
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i actually enjoyed Prince of Tennis the the new OVA that came out
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SalarymanJoe
 Posts: 468 Location: Atlanta, GA, USA |
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For anyone, and I mean anyone, who thinks of Prince of Tennis immediately when they think of sports anime, please check out something more like Touch or Aim for the Ace. It's series like Prince of Tennis that make me want to have to separate outrageous, over-the-top, type of series as a separate subgenre. I'll echo Anime World Order's sentiments that following a sports anime is absolutely no different than following the shounen action/adventure storylines we find in Dragonball, Naruto and others.
Japan's full of sports anime; in fact, it's probably one of the oldest identifiable genres within the medium. And just because you may not be interested in sports as an activity or even watching them on television, many sports anime are also fairly well done character dramas, so there's a lot going on and off the field. You can tell from Justin's articles on Ace and Touch - he ends up focusing little on the actual sports action because in reality they only act as a driver for the characters to move the story forward.
If not parody, then homage. And, while Top ' nerae! pulls directly from Ace 'o nerae!, I believe that similar main character-coach relationships existed earlier than Ace in 1968's ATTACK NO.1 and 1969's Kyoujin no Hoshi; however, I think Ace was able to have much more residual popularity over time, where ATTACK and Kyoujin no Hoshi are practically unheard of outside of their generation, let alone Japan. Now I want to do more research and try to host a sports anime panel. 
And I just died a little inside. |
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ximpalullaorg
Posts: 396 |
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I personally have seen this anime, and I still think as of today that it's not that good, especially since, even for a shojo, relationships between the characters are so exxaggerated that are sometimes laughable.
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Bara_Megami
Posts: 106 |
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As someone who got very screaming-at-the-screen-no-wait-just-one-more-episode involved in Princess Nine, I must say checking out Aim for the Ace should be on my list. I really get drawn into those over-the-top emotions for whatever reason!!
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...M-maybe for a future column? 
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