AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond discusses the show – currently streaming on Hulu - about an 11-year-old girl determined to become a champion figure skater, and how it fits into the universe of sports anime.
This week, I’m looking at the anime series Medalist, streaming on Hulu in America and on Disney+ in other territories. It’s charming, delightfully peppy, and a show that a newcomer to anime could watch. It’s about an 11-year-old girl, Inori, who’s determined to become a champion figure skater.
That seems impossible – Inori has no training, meaning she’s years behind the child skaters who started practically when they could walk. Another obstacle is her protective mum, who’s already seen Inori’s older sister crash out of skating. And yet Inori finds an unlikely ally – a failed skater in his twenties, called Tsukasa, who seems much more boy than man.
After their chaotic first meeting, Tsukasa finds himself drawn in by Inori’s underdog situation, which echoes his own. Then he actually sees her skating and realizes her natural talent. In moments, he’s declaring he’ll coach Inori, and take her to the victories of her dreams.
Animated by the ENGI studio, Medalist is a wholesome, idealistic story. That’s despite its amusing connection to adult anime. The catchy title song, “Bow and Arrow,” is written and sung by Kenshi Yonezu, who’s known to millions of anime fans for his megahit song “Kick Back,” which introduced Chainsaw Man. We’ll show “Bow and Arrow” below; if you want to weigh it against “Kick Back,” see here.
Judging by its first six episodes, Medalist would be entirely suitable for kids of Inori’s age. That can make it seem all the stranger it’s being shown on Japanese TV at 1:30 in the morning. In an earlier column, I talked about anime’s migration from primetime to late-night TV, but more importantly, to online platforms. In Japan, Medalist’s episodes are released weekly to the legal free sites Abema and Telasa, as well as to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and more. Finding it is not a problem.
Centered on outstanding movements
Medalist contrasts with the series I covered last week, Apothecary Diaries, and not just its family-friendliness. As I said last time, Diaries has few outstanding images or movements. Medalist, in contrast, is centered on outstanding movements, namely those of the figure skaters in their soaring glory. Unsurprisingly, the series opens with a promise of what’s to come, with glimpses of a girl spinning through the air and pirouetting on ice – she’s not Inori, but one of our hero’s greatest inspirations. Later we’ll enjoy a full performance by the same girl, though it’s held back to part five.
The latter dance is excerpted here as of writing, so readers can judge it for themselves. I haven’t found any official account of how the animation was made, though past anime used a cocktail of techniques. When I interviewed the Japanese director Shunji Iwai about his film The Case of Hana and Alice, he explained how he mixed traditionally traced rotoscoping with 3DCG models overlaid on live actors (without sensors). While I enjoyed Iwai’s film, I found its animation chronically inconsistent, though the dancing was often best. (A dance is also a standout in Apothecary Diaries.)
Going back to Medalist, I found its dances a wonder, though others may disagree. If you find them too synthetic, there are some marvelous moments in part one when Inori tries to flee after a misunderstanding. She flounders to her feet, then skids down a stair rail. The mayhem reminded me of some of the girls’ best animation in the film Look Back.
Yet most of Medalist isn’t drawn anything like that. Much of the non-skating animation is far more standard, albeit with a focus on manga-style facial grimaces and other contortions. In last week’s column, I mentioned I’m not fond of the slapstick moments in anime, where characters “deform” into cheesy cartoons of themselves. I admit I found it a slight barrier in Medalist too, yet the broad visuals add to the sense that this is a proudly childish anime. Inori is a child, and her mentor Tsukasa is a child at heart.
Anime’s division of labor
Much TV animation from around the world has wildly varying levels of visual quality from scene to scene, shot to shot, moment to moment. TV anime, though, is especially open about it. Its long stretches of basic animation are counterpointed by the moments of dazzle, the artistic tentpoles, like Medalist’s ice dances. And it may be partly rooted in anime’s division of labor.
At least that was the conclusion of the late anime director Satoshi Kon, according to the animator Aya Suzuki. She worked on Kon’s tragically unfinished film The Dreaming Machine. Suzuki paraphrased Kon’s views when I interviewed her in 2012. “He said the industry was like a bunch of people trying to form a circle. The way the European and American industries work is that they put a lot of people together, shoulder by shoulder, and if there’s a space, then they’ll put another person in that gap. In Japan, what everyone has to do is reach out their hands and join them, because they don’t have any more people.”
Suzuki continued, “In the West, everything is separated. You get the animation director, the supervising animator, the lead animator, the junior animator, the assistant animator, the in-betweener, the clean-up artist… In Japan, there are genga animators and doga animators, which roughly correspond to key animators and inbetweeners. But Genga animators do background layouts, character layouts, the effects, and pretty much the clean-up. Doga do the in-betweening tracing, and sometimes the assistant animation as well. In the Western industry, they’ve got probably five different people doing the job of two in Japan – that’s how Kon explained it.”
This may help explain what can seem to foreigners to be glaring moment-to-moment inconsistencies in anime’s style and quality.
Cross-head
Medalist is a sports story in animation. It’s a genre that Western animation is still fairly reluctant to try, with a few prominent exceptions - the spoof How To… films with Goofy, Space Jam, and Pixar’s new baseball-centered show, Win Or Lose. For its part, anime was presenting baseball back in 1968, in the epic-length series Star of the Giants. The name refers to a real Japanese baseball team, the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Giants.
Since then, sports anime have been huge in Japan, looming through successive decades. The 1970s landmarks included Tomorrow’s Joe (about a boxer, now streaming on Crunchyroll) and the tennis show Aim for the Ace! The 1980s were dominated by Touch, another baseball series, and the soccer Captain Tsubasa, a hit in the Middle East. The 1990s brought in the volleyball series Slam Dunk, huge in China, and a depiction of illegal hill road racing in Initial D.
Today, several sports series have strong Western fan followings, such as the volleyball series Haikyu!! and the boys’ swimming saga Free. However, the most obvious precursor to Medalist was Yuri on Ice in 2016, Another figure skating series, it was steeped in happily hilarious homoeroticism. Following its end, fans spent years awaiting a long-promised cinema prequel, only to be dismayed when that was cancelled in April 2024 by its studio MAPPA,
For newcomers to sports anime, I’d also recommend the cinema film The First Slam Dunk. This was reworked from the 1990s Slam Dunk by its original creator Takehiko Inoue, but it’s watchable as a stand-alone. It contains genre multitudes. There’s a brash, air-punching battle in the form of a never-ending basketball game, but it’s combined with the flashbacks of one of the players, a boy on a possibly suicidal track caused by multiple family tragedies. It’s a jarring combo, but it scores.
The competition
Most sports anime, unsurprisingly, focus on characters who are determined to excel, to go the distance and reach the top. It’s interesting, though, to watch Medalist after two other recent animations that are critical of the competitive spirit. The first isn’t actually a sports story. It’s last year’s anime film Look Back, which I discussed previously, about a girl bent on becoming a manga writer. The film shows her talent and dedication, but also her corrosive selfishness; she never values her creative partner until too late.
The other film is presently the highest-grossing animated feature in the world. In Inside Out 2, the girl Riley is frantic about impressing her sports hero, an older girl. Over the film, she shuns her friends, is consumed with anxiety (personified by Maya Hawke’s orange tyrant) and has a berserk meltdown on the ice-hockey pitch.
That’s a contrast to Medalist, where one of the early defining moments has Inori embarking on her first competition, fouling up her first jump and crashing to the ice. Then she lunges to her feet again, beaming and carrying straight on. This marvelous visual moment needs no verbal explanation. This girl’s sporting integrity won’t be knocked down by technical failure or distracted by jealousy or anger.
Another notable thing about Medalist is the role of the coach, Tsukasa. In a Hollywood film, a man becoming obsessed with supporting an 11-year-old skater would be judged creepy, and probably rewritten as a family member. But the set-up of Tsukasa becoming obsessed with a stranger’s story chimes with much current anime. There are so many series today about protagonists entering stories and changing them from the inside, like fearless fanfic writers. Such anime often have names like My Next Life as a Villainess or, indeed, I’m in Love with the Villainess. The current fantasy serial Zenshu similarly throws an animator into her favorite childhood cartoon – I discuss it here.
True, Medalist’s script is careful to have Tsukasa deny he’s trying to live vicariously through Inori’s journey. What he’s doing for her is meant to be pure altruism. But while that’s the in-story rationale, Tsukasa still functions as an audience stand-in. He’s the one who cheers the heroine on, stepping in to help and encourage her where we can’t. As such, he’s part of a tradition that goes back before anime in its mass-industrial form. Indeed, it goes back to 1940 America, and to the top-hatted conscience of a Disney puppet called Jiminy Cricket.
