Ace wo Nerae!

Some genres evolve beyond recognition over the decades. Others have such powerful foundational works that you can still see their DNA in shows made half a century later. Sports anime are very much the latter. The tropes that form the backbone of the genre today can be traced back to shows like Aim for the Ace! Far from feeling like sports anime have left it behind, this 1973 Osamu Dezaki classic is as riveting now as it must have been when first broadcast.

Indeed, the king of melodrama raises the tension to breathtaking heights. Though it follows the straightforward story of a girl learning the hard ... work and guts it takes to master tennis, the visuals ratchet up the intensity masterfully to mirror the emotions of the characters. At one point Hiromi has hard lessons beaten into her in a tennis court enclosed by barbed wire, giving it the air of a prison camp. Umpires are faceless shadows casting judgement over the girls' fates. Barrages of tennis balls strike people like a hail of machinegun fire. Blood flies. Questions of who will win or lose mingle with fears over whether they will wind up crippled for life from overexerting themselves.

It's all interwoven with a solid shojo romance arc and, despite clearly not being a complete adaptation of the manga, reaches a satisfying conclusion with an appropriate final confrontation.

Ace wo Nerae! tells of Hiromi Oka's experiences while she is in her school's tennis club. Personally, I think the anime wasn't anything special and it didn't really stick out to me. I gave the anime a 5/10 overall.

The story was standard for most sports anime. Hiromi Oka joins her tennis team with no skill and eventually becomes better through hard work. There was little romance, but it was entertaining. The tennis matches were also enjoyable.

The art was nice for being from the 70s. The character design reminded me of other 70s anime such as Rose of Versailles. None of the art really stuck out ... to me.

The main character, Hiromi Oka, was very annoying. She cried over everything and the only person who could give her motivation was her crush. All the other characters were pretty boring and monotonous.

Overall, the anime was mediocre and I didn't really enjoy it. If you like 70s anime or sports anime then this might be a good fit for you but other than that there isn't much else this anime offers.

Ace wo Nerae! is an iconic sports series that has been famously referenced in series like Urusei Yatsura and Kill la Kill. Osamu Dezaki, the director behind Rose of Versailles and Oniisama e…, has a directorial style that is notable for using a lot of stills and focusing on dramatic angles of a characters’ personality. I personally am not a fan of his. I think the directing in Ace wo Nerae is artrocious. For a sports show, there is barely any animation in this series AT ALL. When a character hits a ball with their tennis racket, it pans up a still ten times ... and then switches over to character making a shocked face or something comparably outrageous.

• Ace wo Nerae did many things that Ashita no Joe did, at the time, except it had much lower quality and worse writing. This series is like the bootleg Ashita no Joe, but with girls and tennis. I appreciate the avant-garde moments of this series, like there’s a terrifying scene where Hiromi is surrounded by a gaggle of faceless girls and there is eerie music droning in a monotonous humーto represent her feelings of social alienation. Moments like that rarely happened though. There are primarily lackadaisical moments of artists not wanting to draw a characters’ body, so they zoom into a stretched out face while dialogue blares in a beat of faux surreality; this technique is used over and over again!

• The characters are nothing out of the usual. I think Ace wo Nerae was one of the pioneers of a prodigy versus their wealthy, upper-class rival―hence why Kill la Kill used it in a parodical fashion during a tennis match between Ryuuko and Satsuki. The tropes in this series were very worn and scenes always linger on much longer than they need to be. Unless you want to laugh at the absurdity, this series is a bit of a snooze-fest.

• There’s only a small amount of romantic tension is between Takayuki and Hiromi, and it is completely dispersed when her coach tells her to not pursue romantic relationships and the heartbreak leads to Hiromi being able to beat Reika in their last match. That’s a pretty lame motivation for beating a sworn rival. This series carries a very goofy 1970’s vibe, reminiscent of Creamy Mami, and the audio quality is filled with ear-splitting echoes that mirror the original Doraemon (1979).

• Overall, Ace wo Nerae is very plain compared to Dezaki’s catalog of other series, I thought Oniisama e… was full of flaws, but I would suggest watching that or Rose of Versailles over this series any times of the day, his Golgo 13 OVAs also aren’t the worst thing in the world. Unless you want to get your classic shoujo fill, I wouldn’t suggest this series. I give Ace wo Nerae a 2/10.