Ping Pong the Animation Review

Few sports anime are better, and it is barely about the sport. Matsumoto's scratchy, distorted art is preserved and set in motion by Yuasa with a freedom that makes every rally a piece of expressionist animation, bodies stretching and the frame splitting to show two minds at once. Beneath that is a story with the clarity of a fable: Peco has the gift and wastes it, Smile has the discipline and takes no joy in it, and the season forces each to confront what the other has.

The supporting players, the Chinese exile Kong and the driven rich boy Dragon, are each given an inner life and a reason. The show's central image, a hero who comes when you call, is set up in the first episode and paid off in the last with a power that few series manage. The dialogue is spare and exact. It is one of the boldest series the medium has produced, and it took a director who did not care whether it looked like anime to make it.