If you were to map the film onto the circumstances of its making, Kenji Iwaisawa's feature debut ON-GAKU: Our Sound fit perfectly—a project made by self-taught animators about embracing your love of art despite your level of talent. His sophomore feature 100 Meters is less clear cut, but also begins with reflections on whether it's too late to be truly great at something and not just passionate.

In that sense, despite the radical tonal difference between the two films, in many ways this feels like the perfect follow-up. Adapted from the manga by Uoto (Orb: On the Movements of the Earth), Iwaisawa's take on 100 Meters hones in on questions about finding and sustaining meaning in your continuing profession over the years. It does this from different angles, through its dual protagonists Togashi (Tori Matsuzaka) and Komiya (Shōta Sometani). We first meet the two in their preteens. Togashi is a child prodigy sprinter, calm and naturally gifted and relatively popular, and maybe coasting on those talents. Komiya is the opposite: slow, awkward, and nervous.

It's reflected perfectly in even just the style in which they run. Togashi is composed, technique as refined and clean cut as his hair—Komiya is the opposite. He runs for his life, as though being chased—the world melts around him into a frantic blur as he wildly flails, where Togashi cuts straight through. The desperation of Komiya's running is because he “has nothing else,” and so he does it to escape reality for a while and focus on something, anything else. But Togashi gives him an enthusiasm for the sport, an actual desire to be great.

From this point, Iwaisawa patiently illustrates the shape of each of these characters' lives, segmenting the film into three sections—one in their earlier childhood, then high school, and then adulthood. Each chapter after their brief friendship breaks the two apart, gives their lives a lot of texture, and illustrates the stakes of the competition before bringing them back together at the moment where it means the most to each of them. Fans of Orb's intergenerational storytelling may find something to like in this as well, even if this is about just one group of people.

The film doesn't give up all of its time to these two characters, however—Iwaisawa and screenwriter Yasayuki Muto (Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway) are just as considerate of the supporting cast. Togashi's schoolmate Nigami's arc, in particular, is tinged with melancholy as he goes from being a singular talent to someone who struggles with the younger generation catching up to him (something of a warning sign for the later stages of the film). The early childhood section feels like a prologue, both in plot and in style. Following a time skip to junior high school, the animation shifts from regular 2D to mostly rotoscoped animation.

Rotoscoping doesn't mean any kind of restriction of expressivity here—in some cases, the realistic movement can chafe with the design, but 100 Meters has no such problem. It leaves room for the animators to add little flourishes of character beyond the physical performance they're interpreting. It feels surprisingly natural; there's a holistic feeling to the work of Keisuke Kojima, who worked on character design and exec animation direction. The characters are made from blocky jaws and haunted eyes, angular noses; in concert with the rotoscoped animation this adds to the feeling of strain as the characters run. Their bodies feel more like flesh and blood and more vulnerable to the intense contortion of the frame around them—and when the moment comes when the designs begin to contort under that physical strain or the linework itself trembles, the races feel all the more intense.

This constant experimentation means that each of the 100-meter race sequences is incredibly exciting, striking, and new. One begins with a lovely low angle shot, the runners leave the starting blocks and the camera remains, pointed skyward. Another track meet sequence takes its time showing the setup for the race, in one of the film's most visually stunning sequences. A long take shows the racers preparing in heavy rain; the camera slowly drifts away from them, and the background shimmers with what seems like dozens of alternating paintings courtesy of art director Keikankun Yamaguchi, who also worked as a painter and art director on ON-GAKU. Their work on this film is worth highlighting: the background art is particularly lovely, made with incredible tactility and consideration of color, whether depicting the colorful freedom of the track or the oppressive, monochrome interior of the school.

It helps that the dialogue around the running is often presented with a similar kind of dynamism, like the fast-paced push-in to a character, Kaido, talking about how he finds the drive to win. But 100 Meters is not a film about becoming the best, but more about no longer being the best and accepting that with grace. It's a fascinating story to compare with Orb as much as it is ON-GAKU, with generations of people contributing to something bigger than themselves, often at the cost of their lives so that knowledge can move forward beyond the end of their lives—characters in this are constantly thinking about the end: of the track, the race, their careers, their dominance. And it's easy to wonder in a sport like this: why do it? Is it worth hyper-focusing on ephemeral records made to be broken? What's the point in competing when a younger generation is always waiting to pass you by? Just as ON-GAKU was a rough-edged film about prioritizing passion over skill, one might think that higher production values would begin to paper over some of the unique expressivity that made ON-GAKU: Our Sound so compelling. 100 Meters is perhaps a little more buttoned-up, tonally, but it still feels like a film by someone excited to explore different visual possibilities—revealing every possible angle on a sport about running in a straight line.