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The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide
"Ippon" Again!

How would you rate episode 1 of
"Ippon" Again! ?
Community score: 3.9



What is this?

Michi Sonoda planned to quit judo after her final tournament in junior high until her best friend Sanae Takigawa invites her to continue judo in high school.

"Ippon" Again! is based on Yu Muraoka's manga and streams on HIDIVE on Sundays.


How was the first episode?

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

I'll save the spiel (mostly because I'm tired of writing it) about my unending hunt for a girls' sports anime that hits similar beats to boys' sports anime, but y'all? I think we may have finally done it. Cue me and my friends standing in the control room, pulling off our headphones, hugging and cheering while confetti rains down around us. Mission accomplished! We just might finally have found a female-focused series that's interested in the characters playing the sport rather than cuteness or sex appeal, and it's "Ippon" Again!.

But I don't want to talk about what "Ippon" Again! isn't; I want to talk about what it is—a good, solid sports series. I've always liked judo and thought it looked like fun, but I don't really have any deeper knowledge beyond the general principle of using your opponent's force against them. Even without that, I could generally follow the flow of the action on-screen as the girls grappled with one another. Weightiness is absolutely essential to a sport like this, and luckily, there was a consistent sense of oomph and force to their bodies, along with plenty of more subtle movements that ensured the audience could connect each action to the another. The animation in other parts of the episode is a bit more static, and conversations tend to be done via simplified cut-ins of their faces over background shots, but that tells me they knew where to allocate the resources. It's not ideal, but I'm not mad about it either. Bakken Record is a Young Studio without any real hits under their belt, so I wasn't expecting a high-gloss production, anyway.

The story of the episode hits a lot of standard sports anime beats. The quirky Michi wants to quit judo in high school because she feels like she's stagnated, but then the weirdly intense Towa tells her that the team will be disbanded if she doesn't find three more members. Groundbreaking stuff this ain't. Despite this, I found myself quite charmed by the writing and character animation. Even if the basic story was fairly boilerplate, small touches did a lot to individualize it, like Michi carrying her bag by bracing the strap against her forehead. The dialogue keeps a balance of naturalism and energy, building up rapport and chemistry between the four principle characters.

"Ippon" Again! rehashes a lot of typical sports story beats, but being about girls makes it feel much fresher than it would have with a male cast. We deserve middling-to-good sports series too!


Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

There's one thing I'll say about "Ippon" Again!: The people who made it really love judo. We've got realistic footwork, flowing movement, and dynamic camera work. Better still, the animation is used to dilate time—to break down the ins and outs of what's happening visually—so that even someone who knows nothing about judo can understand what is happening at any given moment. But as lovingly as judo is treated in this episode, that's not really what the episode is about.

I think we've all reach that point in our lives once or twice where we have something we love but just have to accept we're not very good at it—and never will be. At that moment, you have to make a choice. Do you give up and start the search to find something you're better at (that's hopefully just as enjoyable), or do you accept that you're just “playing for the love of the game,” so to speak?

"Ippon" Again! is about a middle schooler on the Judo team who has come to this harsh realization and chosen to give up completely. She uses her newfound free time to do all the things she feels she was never able to do while practicing Judo, like relax after school and find a boyfriend. But like with any hard choice, she's had to convince herself—make herself believe that her life will be better off without Judo. No more cold floors in winter. No more having her uniform rub against her summer sunburns. No more broken bones or getting knocked out. I mean, who would put themselves through such hell, am I right?

And then, in one chance moment, she gets to live her dream—to counter throw a strong opponent and land a decisive victory in front of a captive audience. After feeling such a rush, how could she quit? How could she give up when she knows now that all the pain and suffering was worth it? She can't. All that's left is to chase that transcendent moment, even though it's unlikely it will ever happen again. And that's what this series is about. Being unable to give up on the thing you love. Even if sport anime aren't your thing, I can guarantee, if nothing else, this first episode is worth a watch.


Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Finally, we might be getting sports series about girls that is actually about girls doing sports. "Ippon" Again! also has the bonus that the characters act like honest-to-goodness real teenage girls. There's a tendency to write teen girls as universally catty or solely obsessed with one or two generic things. These girls feel like the kind of people I went to school with - they have obsessions, annoyances, and the tendency to change their minds whenever they darn well please. Michi, the primary protagonist, talks a good game about being done with judo now that she's in high school (especially after her humiliation in her last competition in middle school). Still, it feels awfully like this is something that she has convinced herself she needs to do because she is now in high school. It's like taking the notion of the High School Debut and turning it into something else, as if your middle school and high school interests cannot coexist within the same person. It's clear that she does enjoy judo; it just feels like somewhere along the way, she was convinced that it was something that she had to do because of her brother and that it perhaps wasn't delicate enough for one of society's fabled high school girls to be participating in.

The judo itself is well done. I don't know a whole lot about the sport, but the sounds of it being practiced carry a sense of the power that has to be used to pull off many of the moves. Feet scrape against tatami mats, and bodies thump down without enough force to actually hurt, but with an actual weight to them that lets you know that someone's entire body weight has just landed. Even the accidental blow to Michi's face during the competition felt real; as she struggled to get back on her feet and resume the match, I was genuinely worried that her neck had been injured. We also get a good sense of the level of balance required, and when we see a shot of somebody's feet as they dig in for purchase on the tatami, it is apparent just how much they are grounding themselves. The physicality is very well done here, and the fact that the athletes in question are girls is not allowed to take away from showing them in unflattering positions or downplaying their strength.

I don't love the character designs; they're squat and round. But that shouldn't be allowed to detract from the overall quality of the episode. The less aesthetically pleasing designs may even allow us to focus on the bodies rather than the faces and keep the girls from becoming too overtly sexualized. It's a strong start, even if the kendo girl annoys me unduly, and if you watch your sports shows for the actual sports, this is worth checking out.


James Beckett
Rating:

I'm willing to throw stars left and right to any anime that can draw and write their teenage girls like teenagers, and "Ippon" Again! is a knockout in that respect alone. I don't expect most fiction to go out of its way to be super realistic about how its adolescents are depicted. Still, as someone who teaches high-schoolers for a living, I find myself getting increasingly impatient with the shows that don't even really try and instead feature a bunch of twenty-something polymaths stuck in the unnecessarily shapely bodies of pinup models. "Ippon" Again! is a sports anime about judo, yes, but what I ended up being the most impressed with was that it managed to give us a cast of very likable, realistic young ladies who are a genuine pleasure to hang out with for a half hour. That is also quite the feat, considering how exhausting it can be for an old fogie like me to be stuck with a bunch of youngsters for hours and days on end.

If Michi wasn't such a charming lass, then I don't think "Ippon" Again! would work nearly as well as it does because outside of a few admittedly well-animated bouts in the first third of the episode, most of this premiere is spent just chilling with Michi, her best friend Sanae, and eventually their tricksy pal, Anna. Michi is trying to put on her best smile as she walks away from an embarrassing final judo loss in the last competition before she enters high school. The show never lays it on too thick with overdramatic narration or waterworks. Thanks to the natural flow of the dialogue and the strong direction, you end up feeling what the characters feel, which endears you to them. Likewise, it makes the non-enthusiasts like me in the audience more interested in the sports half of the equation because it's infinitely easier to get invested in a hobby or sport I don't personally care about when I want to see the characters succeed.

I can't promise that I'm going to stick around with "Ippon" Again! for the whole season since these kinds of anime are often just not the kinds of stories I can stay jazzed about for months, but I'm much more curious to see what happens next than I expected to be. Anyone looking for a new club hangout anime is bound to fall (or get judo-flipped) head over heels for this one.


Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

There are a lot of different ways to approach sports, but media – and anime especially – tends towards the thrill of competition and winning. Most leads in the genre want to be the greatest to touch their ball of choice. But as somebody who likes actual, real-life sports, I'm well aware that most athletes' stories aren't about becoming the GOAT but about finding fulfillment and excitement through self-improvement, especially in martial arts—so seeing that sentiment expressed so poetically in “Ippon” Again's opening minutes had me hooked immediately. These girls might want to win, to be the best, but at heart, they're doing what they do because the act itself is self-evidently rewarding.

That opening sequence, punctuated by the tactile thumps of bodies hitting tatami mats, flourished with romantic shots of the rundown little dojo in the sweltering summer heat, told me I was going to love this premiere. What followed was a down-to-earth, funny introduction to our central cast that manages to paint a simple but relatable portrait of the main character Michi while effortlessly making a sport all about getting beat up look beautiful and inviting. We only see one full match, half of which is played for laughs, but it's more than enough to prove this show can capture the physicality and exertion of a close-contact sport. There's a sense of weight, speed, and urgency to every move that makes middle-school-level judo look thrilling, even if you know nothing about judo.

That focus on physicality runs through the rest of the episode, too, with small details about the characters being expressed by how they walk, how they stand or lean, and how body language changes across a conversation. I loved the detail of Michi briefly putting her duffle bag's strap on her head and walking for a bit before shifting it to her shoulder. It's precisely the kind of absentminded stuff teenagers do and tells you as much about Michi's personality as her dialogue. That dialogue is pretty solid, too, organically telling us about the cast's pre-existing relationships while giving each of them a unique voice. Micchi is again the standout, with the way she keeps rationalizing the end of her judo career, making it evident that she's not actually over it. It's just a great way to get us familiar with – and invested in – these characters without any long-winded speeches about how great judo is. We can tell how great it is because it's written all over these kids' faces.

It's not going to be for everyone – I'm sure the squat, rounded designs will put off folks looking for a more intense sports series. If all you want out of life is a Teppu adaptation, this isn't going to feed you. But if you want a girls' sports series that treats its characters with love and respect and takes their athleticism seriously, this does a lovely job of sucking you in.


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