Aug 8, 2024
Hajime no Ippo is a great story. It’s really interesting to see Ippo grow every fight and also while he grows as a boxer, he doesn’t lose what made him himself as a person. Most of the boxers Ippo fights also have great stories that get you attached to them and want more from them, especially Miyata, Volg, Mashiba, Date and Sendoh. Ippo also feels like the type of character I would’ve wanted from Takemichi from Tokyo Revengers, as they both maintain their personality throughout their growth as characters, but Ippo’s growth feels all the more clearer. Though while I’m not sure how the manga
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is, I think the adaptation itself just has a few problems that hold it back from giving it a 10:
The first issue being Takamura. He starts off almost as a role model when Ippo is learning boxing, but he has a lot of pervy gags most of the times he shows up later on, and they’re not anything that adds to the story, other than him almost getting cancelled for grabbing a woman on one of the dates Ippo and the gang went on. It almost feels like it was done to draw out time to have a bigger gap between the anime and the manga, but it’s very possible that these gags are faithful to the manga. I will say at the very least towards the end of the show it feels like you can see his love for boxing a lot more and it would be nice to see if he grows more in later seasons.
The other issue is the animation. Now this is a Madhouse anime which may lead people to think this has amazing animation, and while there are points where it can look good, the team itself that's on the show is only equipped with two animators that can really do the fights in this show justice: Osamu Yamane and Shin Itagaki. The OPs have industry bigwigs like Takeshi Koike and Takeshi Honda, but Honda never showed up on the show itself and Koike makes one brief appearance on a fight that’s not too important. The artwork in the show is at least overall good, as there’s only a handful of episodes where the characters look like they’re drawn off, but for an anime where the main focus is on fights, a lot of the fights do lend to a lot of reused animation and stills. There’s points where they move well that cut to stills to janky movement to reused shots of the good movement from before. Unfortunately even the final fight of Ippo vs Sendoh is plagued with this, and because of that, even though this match is supposed to be one of the greatest boxing matches ever, the animation doesn’t quite reflect that and I almost wonder if some of the fights in this would be compared to Record of Ragnarok if it came out today. Though I think Ippo vs Date was done pretty well all things considered. Usually I wouldn’t make a huge deal about animation depending on the show, but sports anime do tend to be a hard task to handle and unfortunately they’re one of the types of anime that really need good animation to be interesting from an adaptation perspective and very few sports anime have been able to achieve that in my opinion.
Still though I think Ippo’s journey still shines through to make this a great series, and especially when Takamura is not in the limelight, this is such a blast of a series to watch, but I think some may have a better experience with the manga for the animation reason. I also watched the dub and overall, it has an aged feel to it and some might think that makes the dub bad, but I think it has a nice charm to it and a lot of the voices fit the characters, especially Ippo, the chief, Takamura, Aoki, Kimura, Mashiba, Sendoh and Miyata. It would be nice for the cast to also do New Challenger and Rising, but that’s probably not going to happen. Overall though, it’s a great boxing series that has a few setbacks from it being a masterpiece of an anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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