Attack No.1

Attack No.1 or Mila Superstar as it was called when it aired in Germany is one of the childhood memories I treasure. Though the genre of Anime was not known at all at that time, Attack No.1 used to air with german dub throughout the 90's on german television. It is funny to see that hardly anybody seems to know it here, though most of 10-30 year old Germans have watched the series.

The story is rather old nowadays, young girl joins high school volleyball team, as she gets better and better she does make some friends but also some enemies. As she plays her ... way up to the world championships, new friends and new funny volleyball techniques show up. Although the story is quite worn out, the anime is still fun to watch, as you can share the thrill with Mila during every match.

I cannot possibly separate my nostalgia goggles from my eyes when talking about Attack No. 1. Or as it was known to me and my fellow German speakers in the 90s, Mila Superstar.

Before Sailor Moon, before Dragonball, before Pokemon and Digimon...there was Mila. This was in more ways than one my entry drug into the world of anime.

While it is rather rough around the edges when you look at it today (I mean it was made in the 60s for crying out loud) but it still had all those tropes I would later come to love/hate in anime. It's a sports show with all the ... shounen cliches you'd expect. An underdog story with a rival bully who becomes your BFF by the end, ridiculous superpowers and the melodramatic nail biting thrills of...Volleyball. Sure there were no world ending stakes, but it I'll be damned if it didn't FEEL like the world would end whenever Mila was at the face of defeat. Every time she screamed and cried, my little 5 year old self screamed and cried along. The show had a passion that I was not used to seeing in any other show.

And unlike shounen, Attack No.1 had a cast that was comprised mainly of girl characters. Surprisingly well written girl characters. A sad rarity even to this day. Mila's main concerns weren't boy troubles or looking pretty, she was a goddamn athlete. She had a dream, and my god, she was gonna live that dream if it killed her.

It was in the early 90s, when TV stations in Germany realized that there was a market for Anime in the west, before that time we only had shows like He-Man or Saber Riders, they were fun to watch but their main focus was on fast paced action and a paper thin story. That's probably one of the reasons why I was fascinated by the tale of the courageous Mila(that was the protagonist Kozue's name in German), a fragile girl on a journey to overcome her health issues to become the best volleyball player there is. The theme was rather dark at times, so to ... me it was a completely different experience compared to the action packed American animation shows. That said, there was enough action to be found, I remember being quite surprised as to how interesting watching something like volleyball could be and my younger self got quite invested in the sometimes episode length volleyball matches.

I never was a sports guy and watching sports events on TV felt boring and dull to me, especially if it wasn't something like car-racing for example, where at any minute there could be a fabulous crash, I didn't really think about the consequences of human life's ruined or lost by such accidents as a kid. However in Attack No.1 there were also accidents but they were much more intimate and it had a lot of "put your life on the line" scenes, like most Anime after and probably before it. I don't want to spoil too much about the story though, not that I really could as I was watching this anime almost 3 decades ago and am planning on re-watching it in the near future.

So what's it all about? Kozue is a transfer student at the start of the Anime and quickly finds her way into the schools volleyball team, impressing the coach with her innate talent, that naturally brings about some rivalry with the current top dog in the team. Kozue finds herself challenged by balancing school, social life and sports from the get go. Trying to make friends at a new school and also training to make her mark as a top volleyball player, while not failing in school is no easy task after all. In the later episodes, when Kozue grows up, we also see romance unfold but I can't go into much detail here, from what I remember it was a love triangle story of sorts, nothing special but still enjoyable I guess. So, yeah, besides Kozue's injuries and her fight to be accepted by her peers, there was more than enough drama to be found.

I wouldn't consider Attack No.1 to be the perfect Anime but you will probably not regret finding the time to watch a 100+ action and drama packed episodes of Kozue's way to the top. She's truly a great main character but by no means perfect which makes her struggles all the more relatable in my opinion.

Attack No.1 is my second volleyball Anime after Haikyuu!! and my first one where all the players are girls so I was curious to see how they would handle depicting young girls at the time it came out. I find it admirable though that the manga and Anime are apparently based on the the fact that the women team of Japan won the Olympics (?) a few years prior to it's release. So this Anime is a sort of celebration for this win at the time.

Once again, this Anime is very old so the artstyle and the music aren't what you would probably like ... to see and hear today and the character writing is more superficial and stereotypical at times too. We have the bully who becomes the best friend of Ayuhara, our main girl, and at times the story can feel a bit ridiculous when we get to the points of extreme bullying and certain scenarios which just look a bit unrealistic at times.

What I did like a lot about Attack No. 1 though is that we see Ayuhara developing her skills over a couple of years instead of just one year in high school and see how she fights and makes it big in the end. We start in the second year of junior-high-school with national tournaments and are by the end at her second year in High School where she's presenting All Japan internationally. Whilst I don't know how realistic the techniques are that they use, things like Trinity Attacks and Balloon Spikes were really fun to watch too.

Older Anime easily get forgotten these days due to all the new stuff coming out each season but if you ever have time, I'd recommend trying this show out.