As a preface, this review will be for every instalment of Ippo in animated form thus far. It will include: Hajime no Ippo, Mashiba vs. Kimura, Champion Road, New Challenger, and Rising into its final score though not all series technically enjoy the same score on their own. All story lines continuing on from the anime, even controversial elements in the manga such as
Synopsis:
Hajime no Ippo follows the development of one Makunouchi Ippo, a bullied, timid, bookish high-schooler. He works at his mother's local fishing boat business and is in his final year of high school with the opportunity to join any university and job he could probably want if he put his mind to it. However, on one day, he is being bullied once again by Umezawa and his friends, he takes it on the chin, as usual, before Umezawa mocks Ippo's mother. This singular action causes Ippo to be infuriated for a single moment before Umezawa beats him unconscious. By happenstance, Takamura Mamoru, a promising Middle-Weight (70-73 kg) boxer is running by as a part of his road-work routine (road work referring to boxer and other combat sport athelete's regular running routine), Takamura quickly dispatches the bullies and brings Ippo to his gym: the Kamogawa Boxing Gym, headed by Kamogawa Genji. Takamura reveals that he hates bullies, but especially hates people that let bullies do what they want, before giving Ippo the opportunity to blow off steam by punching a heavy bag with Umezawa's crude drawing on it. Ippo, having never thrown a punch before, demolishes the paper into shreds and sends the bag flying but flaying his knuckles in the process. The other members of the gym note that the latter observation is a sign of a hard puncher.
Takamura introduces Ippo to the world of Boxing with tapes of various Boxers (originally the manga only had Ippo watch tapes of Mike Tyson). Ippo decides to pursue Boxing not just as a fan, but as a fighter, but is admonished by Takamura due to the extreme nature of the sport, Ippo cries before asking "What does it mean to be strong?". This begins Ippo's journey as a Boxer.
Storyline and Characters:
Though not as heady, detail orientated, and inscrutable as other shows such as: Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, Boogiepop, Monster etc. that many anime fans have watched and pretended to watch are; Ippo still holds a very well structured and satisfying loop to each story arc.
The general process goes that Ippo or another Boxer in the Kamogawa Gym will be challenged by or challenge another opponent, this opponent shall be introduced, the Kamogawa Gym's fighters they will study the opponent to the best of their abilities and train in order to beat them, their opponent will do the same with other characters from other gyms often chiming in in order to give predictions and analyses of our given fighters. During this period, tension can be built with any number of interactions, plot twists, and other story elements added in order to give intrigue and suspense to the match. Eventually, the match comes and our fighters duke it out. More often than not, our fighters for this story arc shall be fleshed out even further through internal monologue, flashbacks, and the ilk (anime shit) and reveal their techniques or improvements they've made to counter their opponent. A victor is eventually decided after these multi-episode/chapter wars and the audience is given time to soak in what has happened with moments of brevity before repeating once again.
In essence, this is literally Rocky: the Anime. However, due to Ippo being so long-form as it is, it allows George and the audience to have a fully fleshed out progression of the storyline and characters. With Ippo himself finding himself taking one step forward at a time towards attaining his answer as his fists become heavy with the weight of each loveable, hateable, interesting, and funny opponent along the way. Not to mention the progression of other characters like Takamura, Aoki, Kimura, and Itagaki (the former three of whom are often considered gag characters) being just as tangible as Ippo himself.
Each opponent, no matter how minor, is given a fully fleshed-out set of abilities, personality, and motivations. Making the audience root for or revile them with every shade in the middle explored as well. And when the come times for the match, their character clashes with our main character's own in an intimate, frenetic, and wordless interaction as character is built and revealed. Occasionally, defeated opponents will also reveal themselves later on in the series, making for permanent/semi-permanent fixtures in the series or one-off cameos giving each opponent importance to them not found in some other series which kill off or forget about characters at the drop of a hat.
Art Design:
Ippo is one of the rare instances where both the manga and anime can be both enjoyed on an aesthetic basis with no "objective" medium being better than the other. The anime renders each movement and character with life and energy, as opposed to the "moving manga" art style of many other series. Each punch is afforded weight, power, and speed, instead of resorting to floaty, blurry, streaks, many other shows resort to when showing attacks. Each character's physique is rendered with care and changes over time as they improve, George obviously exaggerates proportions and muscularity greatly with each character packing on muscle like a heavyweight. Each special attack is also extremely distinct from one another making it wholly unique to the character that uses it such as Mashiba's Omni-directional flurry of Flicker Jabs, Sendo's canvas-scraping Smash, Ippo's frenetic weaving to charge for the Dempsey Roll and many others.
However, the last season (so far, fingers crossed), Rising has had some of the most egregious and strange animation errors or just downright wacky moments which are more than unintentional such as when animators just forget to draw Ippo's arms correctly or when [Ippo decides to block Sawamura's punches with his face
](https://youtu.be/-lWapdBPRA0?t=397) but these moments are few and far between though this just makes it that when animation does slip up that it's so jarring to the audience in an otherwise beautiful show.
Sound Design:
Ippo's sound design including its music, voice acting, and sound effects is actually one of its strong suits. Continuing on from the previous point about characters' special attacks - each special attack in the series has a clear sound profile to signal to the audience that it shit is about to go down. Ippo has wind wooshing and jet engines blaring when he charges up for the Dempsey Roll and ear-piercing rubber tires scraping against asphalt is used for his New Dempsey Roll before his muscles and tendons tear apart from Ippo daring to even try to stop his own force and momentum from running its course. Mashiba has an link ear-grating, unnatural drone to signal his taking of the Hitman Stance. ....And Sendo just fucking screams his lungs out, but that's Sendo for ya.
Hajime no Ippo's music is also unique but dominates and dictates the mood and atmosphere evoking a Pavlovian effect in the audience just by being played with most boxing-related scenes marked by jazz and its many sub-genres. Smooth, relaxed, and textbook shadowboxing to the frenetic, unbound energy of sparring or a full-on match can be embodied by the incarnations of jazz. In regards to other scenes, music perfectly dictates their mood as well with the first season making great use of "that sad piano song" which I simply cannot find on YouTube but anyone who's seen the first season of Ippo knows what it sounds like.
That being said, Ippo's unique sound design is only most prominent in its first season. That's partially due to some of the characters these sound cues/songs are dedicated to don't have fights in later seasons. But most of Ippo's unique sound just got forgotten to the wayside as time passed on, for some reason.
Fanbase:
Ippo's fanbase is actually one of the most chill out of all big shonen anime fanbases. That could be due to the large intersection between boxing fans and Ippo fans, with boxers (such as myself, wink wink, nod, nod) being quite calm and nice. But I believe it mostly has to do with the more cult following Ippo has as being one of Japan's longest and largest manga and anime series but still paling in comparison to the massive shonen series out there such as MHA, AOT, Haikyuu etc..
In general, the only thing Ippo's fanbase argues about is about whether or not some arcs are boring. Even then, most of the time, they just post fan-art and memes, keeping only to themselves.
Overall Thoughts/Tl;dr:
This is one of the most influential series in my life, I highly urge everyone to watch it. I guarantee it will make you cry, laugh, love, and hate all at the same time with only minor errors in regards to animation and music exist. Even if one is not interested in sports or Boxing at all: its story, characters, and aesthetic is phenomenal with a gradual, clean progression throughout as the audience grows along with the characters. Only minor errors in regards to animation and music exist.
100/100
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