Review of Ping Pong the Animation

Ping Pong - The Animation, an underdog sports anime of sorts. Ping Pong is promising from the get-go with its fast paced action and resourceful split-frames leaving no idle moments. The animation style is unique and makes use of realistic movement rather than the typical characters only moving their mouth. The surface level plot behind it is also fairly intriguing with quiet and loud ping pong prodigies MC, Hoshino and Tsukimoto. Story: PP:TA leaves nearly no narrative detail unexplained, the story line follows 2 high school boys of opposing personalities and outlooks on life who are tightly connected through the mutual interest of Ping Pong. Theirhigh school team participates in the annual inter-high ping pong competition involving schools locally and internationally, their journey and past is shared as they progress closer to the end of the competition fitting as much details about each other as visually and verbally possible. Doing all that in 11 episodes seems like an interesting idea however, it does mean it'll be slower to process detail on a surface level viewing; most likely requiring one to obsess in order to fully grasp what is occurring (unless you're a literature fanatic with fetishes for dense, unique approaches to the medium) As such, naturally Ping Pong isn't my type of sporting entertainment so it didn't interest me as much. 5/10...

Art & Sound:
I've been searching through forums to find why this series is well praised despite its vulnerability to age and change in generations. The art style, mimics a hand-drawn rotorscoped version of real life, there are no fancy ecchi characters or powerful aura that emitts from powerful opponents visually which means this series stays true to life and rather considers the use of different types of film techniques (wide angle, close up etc.) to portray action. That being said, there are a few things that this series may lack in terms of art: shading is very minimal even toward the climax of the series there weren't many hints toward shading which made the characters feel unrealistic and also the smoothness of the animation was questionable for some scenes. Overall art could be considered a 6/10; Sound didn't excel as much either since it is expected to be naturally well constructed 6/10.

Character:
The one aspect this series excelled phenomenally at was the character development. I always wondered why Tsukimoto's nickname was Smile since his classmates explained that he never smiles and I took that as the textbook reason but the person who began nicknaming him was Hoshino and the main reason was because he actually smiled while learning to play Ping Pong after he had taught Tsukimoto how to play. That level of detail was maintained at the end of the series and could have easily been missed if it was skipped over for a few seconds. The attention to character development in Ping Pong the animation is out of this world, even toward the end character development was maintained with close precision. It's amazing that level of detail would be maintained across all 11 episodes without a drop in quality. 10/10 in character development

Enjoyment:
Despite being an underdog of sports anime, Ping Pong establishes more of the characters (they even paid attention to using chinese VA as international ping pong opponents instead of using English which was surprising.) However, I personally couldn't find the sports premise as entertaining as a racing anime such as initial D or Kuroko no Basket because they give the viewer comic relief and are tailored to the user-satisfaction. As such, I'd rate 4/10 in terms of enjoyment (I still watched it though, just to give it a chance haha)

Thanks for reading :)