Review of Ping Pong the Animation

*This review may contain spoilers* So this is more or less the story of two friends who play pingpong. There are a number of side characters from China -- a david bowie looking guy who's homesick, a snakelike dude (maybe he was japanese, he was their childhood friend or something), and some skinhead who's really good and appears to be in a relationship with his cousin. Given the nature of the the game pingpong, the show addresses the inevitable agon with melodrama by embracing it and resigning itself to having relatively unstable degrees of sincerity, which is all well and good. This allows for some indulgent sceneswith split screens, fantasy sequences, and extended psychological reflections; Of course, most of this is done in relationship to pingpong games.

The two protagonists seem to be rather stereotypical anime characters -- the reflective, unemotional and stoic Smile, and his overemotional friend Peco. Smile is more epicurean, ironically, in his pursuit of pingpong, and Peco is more honor and competetition driven. Over the course of the show they end up coming to amend some of the problems that arise from their radical personas, and learn to be more like the other.

The most notable thing about the show might have to be the art. It is mostly a bland color palette, a strange animation style that nearly verges on being 3d animation, and creative tangents in which color, animations tyle, and realism is vastly stretched into creative but smoothly implemented episodes. On the other hand, the people look very ugly and sometimes the animation isn't as satisfying as it could be, depicting the action less directly than it should. Nevertheless the animation is at least interesting.

Mostly a quiet little anime that you don't need to take all that seriously, with action that embraces its melodrama.