Ping Pong the Animation

Oh yeah, Ping Pong: The Animation.
I know I'll get reports and dislikes for this one,
but please bear with me, since this is my oppinion.

Story: 4/10
The story of Ping Pong is probably one of the poorest executed versions of 'Cliche-Sports-Story Mk I'. There isn't even much I could spoil. What do you expect of the most cliched sportsstory?
Take a while and imagine. I'll give you a hint its the same principle used in next to every shounen, as well as probably every sports anime.
I don't have much of a problem with such a storyline in itself, but if the story is like that, you'd need some ... other points to make up for it. And I simply couldn't find anything to make up for it. There is no comedy, no fanservice, no action scenes or anything else which made up for the classical storyline.

Art: 1/10
The original manga is actually from 1995 while the anime aired 2014. Still, at that time anime like Detective Conan or Dragonball also aired. Why would I be ever pleased with that art? In a way this style is really unique. Yes, I definitely haven't seen something like this before.

The background arts -> boring
The character designs -> ugly
The animations -> simply pathetic

If you want an idea of what I mean by ugly character desings, just click one of the pictures above in the characters section. Most of the characters look like they didn't want to spend more time then necessary on the characters. The characters are merely some rough outlines, with some strokes as facial expressions. This can't obviously be enough.
As for why the animation is simply pathetic: I noticed it rather early in one of the table tennis games. The ball nearly went to the ground, but they got it back on the table. In a straight line. From UNDER the table. One of the greatest physic fails of all time.
Sure, this might be intentionally by the drawers. Or it might just as well be a crude mistake.
I personally prefer realistic and fluent movements.
For reference also a reason why the background arts are boring: In the first episodes, the main characters gym is presented. Fair enough. In the later episodes, the rivaling school has the exact same gym. Well with everything which was green in the main heroes gym being purple...
Summed up, the rather low quality of the anime completely distracted me from everything else.
It took several hours for me to get used to it, and by that time the anime was already half over.

Sound: 4/10
The voice acting was basically mediocre. The only voice I even remember is Wengs. I'm personally a fan of using original languages with foreigner characters. And well, Weng, or his seiyu, pulled that one off pretty good. Next, the BGM: unmemorable.
And I mean unmemorable. I watched one of the episodes again, just caring for BGM. And theres next to none to begin with. This one might be for style reasons, making the actually existing ones more important, but those that actually exist are just mediocre tracks sadly.
As for how they are mediocre. They sound generic and could be used in every anime. They don't connect to what the anime wanted to present, or at least thats what it feels like for me.
Last, we have the opening and ending, which both were, to be honest, absolute forgettable as well. Just as the BGM, if there wasn't the video, I would never even imagine that this would be Ping Pongs Opening/Ending, which is really sad.

Character: 4/10
And once again Kong Weng is the guy who saves up some points.
Both his background, as well as his character was well fleshed out and, to top it off, realistic.
I really disliked both main characters, because both only have one or two memorable traits.
Their backgrounds get described every once in a while in some talkes other characters have, and to be honest, those backgrounds are, just as the story, used a hundred times, again.
This is one of the mainreasons I didn't enjoy Ping Pong at all. Everything seems just like we've all seen it before, with nothing which elevates it out of the masses.
The character development, especially Smiles, came off rather forced.
Pecos on the other hand, was the classic shounen development. Its a reasonable one, but once again an abused one.
At least the side characters are, compared to other anime, acceptable.
They have some traits that make them enjoyable, backstories that might make them interesting or developments, which make them more vived. But, here as well, these are the classical ideas, used just another time.

Enjoyment: 1/10
I only laughed once in the whole anime. And thats because of a scene where the arts nearly killed me. I personally hated this stuff, but since its a Top 100 I wanted to give it a shot and also have it completed.

Overall: 3/10
In my opinion one of the poorest anime I've seen so far, and I'm at 100 days of watching anime.
Maybe you're better off trying it for yourself, because I absolutely disliked it and can't possibly recommend it. Maybe you'll come to like something, I absolutely didn't.
If you're interested in sports anime however, just go with Kuroko no Basket. If you're interested in good character development, go with one of KEYs works, either Clannad, Little Busters!, or Angel Beats.

THIS IS THE GREATEST...................................DISAPPOINTMENT!!!!!!

This show is ass and not the good kind.

I am going to compare it to Van Gogh's 1888 "The Night Café" throughout this review. When anyone looks at "The Night Café", they see a subpar painting. They are standing there confused as to why everyone is proclaiming this to be a fine piece. You need to know that the light green bar is representative of the green fairy. You need to know that the clock is just past twelve so it isn't tactful to be drinking during either time. You have to know that the warm walls with the white tables will ... cause the tables to seemingly walk away from the walls if heavily intoxicated. Then you must be aware that the yellow room in the back is inviting and is everything that isn't the room you are currently in. I can go on about this piece for about ten minutes and I feel like I am pretending to be every zealot who loves "Ping Pong The Animation".

Just like "The Night Café", people go out of their way to polish a turd. People make it sound like it is the only "coming of age tale" when there are indeed tons of them. "Coming of age" may as well be it's own genre. They recycle the exact same scenes when showing character development. Let's watch Peco get slapped again. Let's see if Ping Pong Man becomes anything significant. I have played sports and I was good at some and not so good in others. Big deal! I personally lived the best part of this anime with little to no effort. I like abstract representational art. I appreciate the use of symbolism and scale to convey points. This show borderline took the piss with it's art. No one could have actually been touched by the guy on the beach. He was wandering around like an emo kid and it kept reoccurring without anyone caring about him.

The art-style is awful. I understand wanting to stay true to the source material, but alterations would have been seriously advised. Let's take something everyone loves; Steins;Gate. The art in the anime was similar to the VN, but someone with common sense realized that it would be a feat to keep that style up for an entire anime. They took some polish off and kept the same feeling. This is an adaption done correctly. I have seen cars hit by trains that had smoother lines than what this animation has given us. People fail to realize failure when they love something and overlooking flaws is a virtue. The quality of an abstract non-representational piece of "art" done by a 5 year old that has been given three colors will be of the same caliber.

I want to touch on the music quickly. There is one good song called "Dragon" and it goes "Hoo-Ha PING PONG" and then repeats. There is also one song that is so bad they didn't even put it on the OST. Listen for the humming song in the show if you want to go into an audio induced coma.

The show was not enjoyable and I cannot believe that this is rated so highly. This show demonstrates how strong the troll community is by jokingly rating this show a 10. Most people that love this show have an average of less than 6 because they are the wannabe anime critics/hardasses and they all need a joke like "Cory in the House" to keep in their own circle.

Avoid the show at all costs. Not worth your time.

I want to like this show more than I actually do. First off, it’s racist (I’ll explain in the Writing section). I would have dropped the show by the end of episode 5 if it weren’t for Kong, my favorite character. Seeing him reappear in episode 8 encouraged me to hang on. Episode 10, the second to last episode, was the first ostensible feeling of fun I had watching the show. Episode 11 then wrapped up the series in a satisfying manner.

- Story. This show is 40% sports 60% character arcs. There were a couple revelations about character backgrounds and relationships that pleasantly surprised ... me. However, the pacing was too slow. Half of the main and supporting cast are unlikeable for the first two thirds of the show. Kong and Akuma had the tightest narratives, with clear motivations and actions resulting from their internal struggles. The others had several logical inconsistencies that got in the way of convincing storytelling even though I understood what the show was trying to say with each of them. It follows that the payoff from episodes 10 and 11 took too long to arrive. In my opinion, there was enough imagery and foreshadowing that 2-3 episodes’ worth of B-roll and extraneous side plots (such as one character’s weird incest romance, or a background character's soul searching journey) could have been cut. It was not worth my time sitting there waiting for things to “get good” between Kong episodes.

- Characters. Each character grapples with what ping pong means to them. Why do they work so hard to train? Why do they want to win? Why do they like to play? Do they like to play? Who are they playing for? The answer is rooted in their individual pasts and life experiences. Kong is the star of the show for me. He faces high stakes pressure fueling his desire to win. What is most compelling, however, is how he deals with his trials and tribulations. He changes so much as a person by the end of the show. His reasons for change are open to interpretation, but I think the show gives me enough information to come to a conclusion that makes sense.

- Art. The lineart style is exceedingly HIDEOUS! In fact, the lineart is so poor that a character who changed his fashion sense was literally unrecognizable until another character said their name. It made me realize there are basically no character models for faces. As for the colors, I liked the pastel-like shading style. It made some background scenes look really nice.

- Animation. Decent for a lower budget show. It is rough around the edges, yet it fits the unhinged art style. There is some weird 3-D CGI, but I think the team did the best that they could. They made interesting stylistic choices such as animating an actual arrow as the ball travels between players. I was worried about the recycled animations, but there was only one episode in which I fast forwarded through them.

- Music. I thought the soundtrack (synthwave/electronic vibes) was fantastic. The use of the music transformed the mood of the scenes.

- Sound design. The actual selection of sounds was fine, but I noticed several moments where the sound didn’t sync to the animation. Most frequently, a shoe would skid on screen and the sound came late.

- Writing. What's up with the casual racism? Kong is referred to as “China” throughout the show. Not “that Chinese guy” or “Chinese player”, just China, as in the entire country. While they called him China less frequently out loud as the show progressed, they still referred to him as China in writing on screen and then once more in episode 8. While his Chinese identity is part of his character development, I don't care for this offensive delivery. Early on, they also threw in a stereotype about black people being good at dancing, in order to combat stereotypes (the irony). Who greenlit this? I expected better from 2014.

Even though relationships are supposed to be a core theme of this show, several depictions did not make sense. Without giving too much away, the friends in this show seemed to support each other less than their rivals/antagonists. It was hard to believe the utter dearth of empathy between two characters when they were extremely close childhood friends. Their supposed fallout was not properly explained; I wasn’t buying the one-liner provided in the show. Furthermore, Peco and Smile’s team has zero camaraderie - we constantly see the bad blood between seniors and first years -- and somehow they are on good terms at the end. The seniors had even expressed their bitterness at being neglected by their own coach, who focused all his energy on developing Smile.

Smile and his own coach’s relationship was also unconvincing in comparison to Kong and Peco’s relationships with their coaches. I do not understand where Smile and his coach began trusting each other and working together. His coach seems more interested in beating the competitive drive into Smile instead of drawing out Smile’s intrinsic motivation.

Speaking of character motivations, a couple of main characters had confusing turning points in their motivation. I could identify that there was supposed to be a catalyst, but not what it was in the scene. I had to look up other people’s interpretations online because the show didn't leave enough breadcrumbs to figure it out myself.

For some reason, this show likes to tell you all about Smile’s prowess rather than show it as it does for the other skilled players. It was irksome to hear a side character remark for the umpteenth time that Smile was a ping pong monster murder machine. I think we got it the first time, and the second time, and the third time, as they played robot noises synced to his movements… His matches were boring and predictable.

Once finished ping pong the animation the first thing i had to do is write this review to help any person who has the slight thought of watching this anime not to do it. It's awful and THE ONLY REASON someone should see this anime is to fill his own anime list, that's the only thing this anime is worth for.



- Story (3/10): Is not that different from others sports anime, both main protagonists smile and peko are pretty good on ping pong, they sign up to the spring tournament in which they both fail, so, they train for several months until ... the next tournament comes up and they win, very standard.



- Characters (1/10): Every character is a copy-paste, all of them are extremely cocky and arrogant until of course... they lose a match, suddenly their attitude change
to a more pleasant attitude. THIS IS BS, you can't even consider this as character development, happens to literally every important character on the anime so you get tired of this very soon.

About the main character smile, he is a kid on an emo phase in which doesn't show any emotions with the catchphrase that he only plays for fun and whenever he's about to lose he just activates the robot mode making him almost impossible to beat... basically his hidden talent but yet, halfway through the anime he realizes how good he is and then he turns as cocky and arrogant as the other characters making really hard to empathize with him.



- Dialogues (1/10): First of all, if you going to watch this anime and you have no clue about ping pong whatsoever, I'm sorry for you because only awaits you lot of jargon and technical words about different types of techniques, play styles, serves, types of rubber and rackets... So, you keep watching the anime without any idea of whatever they are saying or pause it and do a research on google about what they are talking about.

Separately, the dialogues between characters is very poor and not realistic at all, most of the time they just chit chat no sense, neither plot related. If not, the conversation becomes a bragging competition in a way or another you can easily tell that this is a very low effort to fill because of the short story-plot that this anime has.



- Art-style ~ Animation (1/10): This is by far the worst of all, awful, I understand that they wanted to be loyal to the manga art style since it's different, but making something different doesn't mean it's good, even less this type of art-style on a sports anime. In conclusion, what you get left are really poor animated matches since they are not fluid at all, the movement seems very rusty and at the end it feels like watching a PowerPoint with gifs of two guys bouncing a ball for 4-5 times alongside a ping pong ball sound effect. Once someone scores the score-board suddenly raises to 6 so if you somehow managed to enjoy the match it won't last for very long because every match lasts in between 15 seconds (less relevant) to 3-4 minutes as much... only excluding ONE match, the semifinal. And that was the good part, the way they animated the fill training episodes it's way worse. A bunch of really really really low-quality art designed characters as background while seeing just recycled animations and moves episode after episode makes you want to go to sleep and drop the anime instantly.



- Overall (2/10): The only good thing I could say about the anime is the fact that I didn't expect who was going to be the winner of the last match on the tournament and caught me by surprise, anything but that it's just legit garbage. This is a bad anime, you can tell instantly, even if you rate it high or low, this is an overrated anime which you will forget in a couple of days. It does not mark or affect you at all like other animes. Even once you finish it you can't really have a discussion or a conversation about this anime... because nothing interesting nor entertaining happens. This is not an anime you want to recommend to someone, even if he's new to anime or someone who has seen 400+ animes, because this anime... It's just a WASTE of time. Poor Story-line, awful characters/dialogues, the art-style and animation it's beyond horrendous...


Avoid watching it.


Every feedback is very helpful... Thanks!

Regarding Anime genres, after a certain point it is difficult to constantly find new titles to pique one's interest. I was avoiding Ping Pong the Animation for the longest time, because I really did not want to suffer through another Masaaki Yuasa overrated mess. But given the lack of any interesting sports anime (on my radar at least), the high rating, and the NoitaminA length, I decided to give it a go. On hindsight, maybe I should've tried to get into the Mahou Shoujo genre.

I already can hear the opposition arguing that this is not a sports anime. Well, we have high-school sports clubs, ... rivals, mentors, training montages, and tournaments. So, yeah, it is a sports anime. Maybe it transcends the genre you say? Failing the aspects that make the genre great does not imply transcendence. Not sure what the right word is, but it is not transcendence.

Let us examine why. Firstly, there are no stakes in Ping Pong the Animation. There is zero interest for the outcome of the matches. And as a side-note, the outcome of each one is painfully predictable. The sports genre has been successful, for at least 35 years, in creating stakes using as simple a device as “Zettai Koshien”. Simply disregarding that characteristic takes away much of the flavor. Even the various skill levels and the closing of the skill gap is presented without consistency and logic, making the matches even less interesting (and I repeat, they are already predictable). A final note on the subject of the matches, I dare you to try to handle the cheese of the semi-finals.

You would think that since the sports facet is not emphasized, the characters would be well written and a coming of age story would emerge. It does not. The characters are a collection of over-the-top scenes that highlight their traits, and then, we receive neither substance nor development. Ok, I guess Wenge Kong, even though he started as a caricature, had an interesting story, but he is only a minor character.

That lack of substance is the major problem; no matter how many times you repeat “The hero comes” and “Blood tastes like iron”, no matter how artsy you make the image while you repeat it, if you fail to attach any meaning to it, it's just pretentious and hollow. I would rather hear “Katsu! Katsu! Zettai katsu!” for the millionth time from a character I care about, than this pointless drivel.

To be fair, there are some interesting psychological ideas present in the beginning, but they are not worth mentioning because they are immediately dropped in favor of the pointlessness and the pretentiousness. Even Battery, a later NoitaminA addition which the consensus (rightfully I think) judged as a failure, tried harder to get away from the typical genre tropes and touched more mature psychological subjects with better care.

I should say something about the weird art style.I do not even mind it. I think in general it is good to experiment with different art styles, especially when the CGI dominance is upon us, but the style was not something special. It had some artistic moments, but nothing that could come even close to saving the train-wreck.

I wrote too many words where one would suffice to describe Ping Pong the Animation. That word is insipid. My suggestion is also brief: Do not watch it. I know that taste is relative and “To each his own” is a very important axiom to me, but I think the Anime/Manga community should not fall so easily for blatant pretentiousness and/or hype. 3.5/10.

At first, I will say that I am truly sorry if I'm going to offend anyone with this score. I've met a few people that almost disowned all my anime opinions the moment I said I don't like this one, bonus points if I could say I've dropped it mid-way.

The only thing I don't have any problems with is the story, I would totally watch if done by different people. Otherwise, I found it extremely hard to watch, I strongly dislike the art and animation style (and don't give me the usual stick that different doesn't equal bad, I know that, bad equals bad, it ... doesn't bother me that it's different) and I also find most characters very unlikeable. The animation bothered me so much that it gave me headaches two episodes in, or in my experience, 3-4 hours in the second episode. Oh, yeah, I also found it boring. Overall it doesn't sound like a pleasant experience, does it?

But I can still see why people would like it and I respect studio to go with this unorthodox art style. At the same time, I can clearly see why some people would hate this one and as you can see, I'm not going with the usual stick, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle, I will fully admit that I don't like this anime and I don't care how innovative and creative it is. And to many fans, stop being so pretentious, a majority of watchers rated this anime high, you are not a special snowflake if you enjoy it too and it doesn't make your exquisite taste above everyone else's.