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How Aoashi Takes a Birds' Eye View of the Soccer Pitch

Aoashi, the detail-oriented soccer anime that celebrates technique and strategy more than winning, does something amazing with its action scenes—it uses the same talent the main character learns to harness: foresight and total spatial awareness. Based on a 2015 manga by Yūgo Kobayashi, Aoashi follows the cutthroat and anxiety-tinged world of the Japanese youth soccer pipeline. The main protagonist, Ashito Aoi, is a talented but inexperienced soccer player who gets the opportunity to join a professional team's youth academy. Unlike traditional sports anime where the formula tends to follow wunderkinds on their journey to certain victory, Aoashi is about Ashito's struggles, his re-learning of basics, and even the ego blow of being moved from his dream position. Along the way, he learns that he does have a very useful gift—he's able to conjure up a bird's-eye view of the pitch, keeping track of the position of every player on the field, and anticipating where they'll go next.

It's this same ability that fuels the fast-paced, dynamic animation behind the series. Speaking more about it at this past weekend's Anime NYC was Aoashi producer Junichi Katsutani, who was on hand to talk about how the animators used their own birds' eye view of the matches to plan every play. He described one of the biggest challenges of adapting the manga to animation as simply keeping track of who has the ball when. While a manga panel can simply show a player with the ball, in animation, the passes have to follow a logical flow.

Katsutani then showed attendees a behind-the-scenes video that showed a top-down view of circular icons moving along with a ball. As the play advanced, so too did all the icons and the ball. “We create a movie like this to show the 22 players so that the animation team understands the movement of all the people on the pitch.” This means that for every pass animated, the team knows exactly who has the ball, where it's going, and where it came from.

That movie then becomes the basis for motion capture, which is broken up into shorter individual plays. As performers act out these plays, the movement is instantly captured and coarsely rendered onto a screen. “The captured movement shows up on the monitor in the back and in the CG right away,” Katsutani explained, saying that it gives the director and animation staff a chance to watch it back and decide, “That movement didn't really work out. Let's do another take.”

In addition to helping the team plan out the scenes, being able to trace the motion capture also allows animators unfamiliar with soccer to create dynamic, life-like plays. But mostly, it's about capturing the flow of a real soccer match. “None of the players are stationary. They're always moving… To have all of the background players realistically moving all the time gives a more realistic feeling to the animated game.”

Of course, it doesn't mean the animators are locked into certain angles—quite the opposite. Once the plays are modeled into 3D CG, the team is able to reposition the cameras and adjust the timing as needed. “With 3D CG, it's easier,” said Katsutani. “We have the freedom to do freer, creative camera work, and we can slow down the movement. We can do a lot with CG.” Once the action is established, the primary characters in the foreground are animated traditionally and given the final go-ahead by the sakuga director. This allows the finished product to retain the “kind of powerful action unique to anime.”

Season two of Aoashi is scheduled to premiere on Crunchyroll on October 4, 2026.