One overlooked strength of anime is how it can make the mundane beautiful, how it can set a scene or mood by just a serious of establishing shots and the right music:
Yes, this could be done in live action as well, but it could never be as beautiful.
It sets the stage for the story Mou Ippon! wants to tell perfectly. We start with the sun high in the sky, a hot Summer’s day, the noise of cicadas in the background reinforcing it. Pan down to your typical anime high school, slowly focusing on a cicada on a tree. A loud thud scares it and it flies off. The thuds repeat as we come to the martial arts dojo. Coming inside we still don’t know what’s causing the thuds as the camera focuses on the details of the hall: the half open blinds, a fan, a water bottle, the tatami mats covering the floor. Then, a hand pushes off the mats and we zoom out to see a girl in judo gear doing rolling exercises, causing the sound that lured us here. When she finishes them, we get our first look at her face and follow her line of sight to the doors, where her three friends just came in. The scene continues for a while, showing how comfortable and content the four are practising with each other. Three of them spar for a while, while the fourth does stretches; she’s slightly different from the others. It ends with them in a circle on the tatami mats, hot, sweaty but happy. Then cue title drop and the actual start of the story.
It all starts with Michi, the girl practising on her own, and Sanae going to her final judo competition in middle school. They’re the last two left of their school’s judo club and have little hope of making it far. And indeed, after Sanae is eliminated so is Michi, when her opponent gets her in a headlock and she loses consciousness. To make matters worse somebody videoed it and put it on social media. Michi isn’t too heartbroken as she wants to quit judo anyways in high school. When they do get into high school some time later, their other friend Anna tries to convince Michi to join the kendo team. She lures the both of them to the dojo where they stumble upon the same girl who defeated Michi holding off the entire kendo team while trying to lay out the tatami mats needed for judo. Turns out the judo club no longer has members so the kendo team will take over the entire hall. Towa counters that they only need three members to revive the club and then starts fighting with Anna over Michi. Then, through some clever foot work by Sanae, Michi gets in a judo grapple with Towa and defeats her with an ippon. End result: they’ll join the judo club.
If you watch this and notice a little bit of a lesbian tone to the proceedings, you’re not wrong. It’s clear that Sanae only started judo to be with Michi, while Anna is as obviously infatuated with her sporting prowess — and maybe more — as well. Even Towa seems to be strangely attracted to her, stalking her as she left that judo competition trying to get her attention, but failing to do so through Anna turning up at the wrong moment. And then she engages in a literal tug of war about her with Anna, which couldn’t be more obvious. Now all of this may just be simple friendship but I’d like it to be a bit more if possible. In any case this already looks a really fun series. The fights so far have been excellent, selling the physicality of the sport really well. This looks to be more of a series about the camaraderie of doing a sport together than about winning the Interhigh, which I can only approve of.
