Taisou Zamurai

For fall 2020...this was the biggest let down to be honest.

Story and characters had so much potential but the 11 ep run just caused the series to never really flesh out out what really needed to be there. This was a 24 ep character drama forced into 11 ep with the finale literally cutting into multiple character arcs without any clear resolution for 2 of the 3.

Art was solid...outside of the really mediocre 3DCG. Even if the back drop was gymnastics the CGI was bad especially for MAPPA standards. It was PS1/Cyberpunk 2077 on a ps4/xbox one levels of bad. The ... 2D art was solid though I will give.

Sound: OST and SFX nothing really to complain about here to be honest.

Overall: Ever had some tacos that you thought were ok until you got in an elevator and let one rip? That's this series to frank.

Taisou Zamurai is definitely and oddball, it’s one of the most unique shows of the year and also one of the weirdest slice of life anime I’ve ever seen. The first two episodes are the divisive type that either hook you or alienate you to the point of dropping the show, which suffers from a serious identity crisis.

The premise make it seem like it’s just a sports anime but no, it’s also a drama about a man who has to take care of his daughter all alone by himself because his wife died, it’s also a comedy that keeps throwing random things at screen, from ... a fake ninja who is pursued by agents, to a weirdly drawn parrot, to a gyaru who changes her language at times, to an acupuncturist drag queen, to references to fictional action movies and the list goes on.

It’s also a coming of age story since there’s a noticeable time invested in developing the protagonist’s daughter and how she deals with her dead mother, her absent father, the kids at her school that makes fun of her dad, the ninja’s weirdness and all that stuff.

This weird blend of elements is what gives it an identity and makes it memorable but at the same time is what makes it hard to gain and define an audience. Everything gets its fair share of time but nothing gets enough time on screen before moving on to something completely different.

If you just want to chill and be moved by Rei’s character arc, you have to wait until some episode decides to focus on that because in the middle you’ll get weird comedy and basic training, yet if you stick with it, you’ll get the best and most moving episodes this anime has to offer.

She’s basically like Rin from Usagi Drop or Hime from Kakushigoto, only a lot more mature than them despite all of them sharing the death of at least one of their parents. Her character arc reminds me of some Simpson episodes dedicated to Marge or Lisa where they accept everything that happens around them concerning their families the best they can before they snap, then they deal with the consequences of their actions and grow because of those events, with the obvious difference being that her development is not undone because this is not an episodic comedy. She also gets to find what she wants to do with her life which is basically follow her mother’s footsteps.

If you want to see an inspirational sports series, Joe’s arc is pretty well done for you, not only he practices a sport which wasn’t covered much in anime (right now I can only think of Ganbarist Shun! as an alternative, and it was a completely different series), but the show spends a fair amount in building a fading star type of story around him. At first, it seems like it was all due to an injury but as later episodes reveal, it has to do with his own regrets and traumas he can’t leave behind, until he does because he needs to regain his former glory in order to take proper care of his daughter.

On top of that, Taisou Zamurai does the unthinkable thing of spending time in his training, showing concepts and rutines concerning his discipline and the ever present risk of not being able to perform ever again if he makes a wrong move or gets permanently injured because of excessive training, this is what other shows such as Iwa Kakeru lack and what I complained about in my review about it.

The downside is that the actual sport is not shown in a very inspirational way, the training is mostly skipped, the matches are shown quickly, and the CGI models used in them are poorly made and even more poorly animated, this definitely does not make the gymnastics to look exciting.

With that said, we see him recovering and training in order to make a new skill that will give him more points in his competitions and it’s partially thanks to his interactions with Leo, the fake ninja who’s actually a dancer. This guy is the weakest main character for me, he’s just clowning around for most of the time, and his own story is not that interesting nor explored much, but as his role of someone who has a positive influence on Joe, and at the same time gets influenced by him goes, he makes a good plot device.

I don’t have much to comment on the comedy, it’s the type of random comedy I just can’t bring myself to like, it’s not the type of over the top humor that I hate (Nichijou, Asobi Asobase, fucking Pop Team Epic, stuff like that) but for a slice of life anime, this just puts me off. Whether if this is a negative or not, it’s entirely up to each person. One thing that I have to give credit to the show is not mixing any of this silly stuff with the dramatic moments, I may not like these elements, but at least the show does not suffer from tonal whiplash.

As I hinted earlier, the first issue with Taisou Zamurai is that it’s poorly animated, leaving the sport aside, the artwork and the simplistic character designs are definitely lacking detail and the models get deformed from time to time, both the backgrounds and the effects are also simplistic and the motions, even outside the gymnastics, are rather poorly made.

As for the sound, the voice acting is ok when it’s serious and mature and kinda bad when it’s silly and comical (except for Kappei Yamaguchi as that parrot, what a guy), so it stands somewhere in the middle, the soundtrack is mostly absent or forgettable, the ending is alright, the opening is not. I don’t understand why they went with rap of all things and even having these three voice actors who are not really good at singing and one of the characters hate (or pretends that he hates) the other two so what is he even doing there. The sound effects are very good to the most part, in both the daily life moments and the sport competitions.

But down to it, Taisou Zamurai’s biggest problem is it’s biggest strenght, having this silly comedy thrown at screen and blend of different genres in just eleven episodes makes the pacing very uneven, constantly changing things and tones and dragging the plot down before forcing it to go really fast in the final episodes, thus making the show feel both fast and slow at the same time.

If you want something rather unique, here you have an aging sportsman, as he is trying to get over the death of her wife in order to improve himself and be a good father, a little girl realizing what she wants to do with her life, as well as what she does in her school and her home, a breath taking dancer who runs away from the pressure of being amazing and pretends to be a ninja while he’s chased around the world by other performers, I think? I didn’t really understand what the hell they are, they look like they belong in Men in Black rather than here. And you also get a look at a rather unique sport.

In the middle, try to deal with an acupuncturist drag queen, Kappei Yamaguchi destroying his lungs while voicing a south american parrot, a grandma who runs a bar and looks like she belongs in Gangsta or Black Lagoon that also drives the car of another person like Irisviel from Fate/Zero in a road full of traffic, from a stadium to an airport and back again to the stadium, mildly cringy and mildly inspirational monologues taken from fictional schlocky action movies, and an undeveloped romance between a guy who can’t speak normally and a gyaru whose words can’t be understood 95% of the time she talks, even when she’s not changing languages just because she feels like it.

If you don’t mind any of that as well as poor animation, you get a mostly decently made story with mostly decently written characters, that got completely overshadowed by Haikyuu! As for me, if the show had one or two more episodes, its events were paced a bit better, and it didn’t have these weird elements and comedy, I would have rated it a bit higher, but I won’t since that wasn’t the case, yet I can still say that it is among the best shows from this year, even if that doesn’t mean much.

As for some recommendations there are:

-Ganbarist Shun! the only other pure gymnastics anime that I know of, but beware for it’s a school comedy with some ecchi.

-Igano Kabamaru, horribly animated, among the craziest and weirdest school comedies anime ever put on screen, staring an actual ninja.

-Usagi Drop and Kakushigoto (the anime versions of both of them), slice of life anime about grown men taking care of a little girl by themselves, way more simple but also way more focused.

Taisou_Zamurai is the typical original sports anime that was made to commemorate the Olympics of all the sports anime that were made with this idea. I thought it had a lot of potential and deserved an 8 since its clichéd plot of the typical athlete who was at the bottom and then it sank to the bottom it had a main character that you would support until the end but the final chapters and lack of character development made this anime a waste of time
1- Main characters:
Aragaki, Joutarou: he is a character who feels that all his development to reach the Olympics is in a ... natural way, so you want to support him at all times as his daughter, but not having that final battle in the Olympics means that everything is in vain and a waste of time as watching his training in China

Sturges, Leonardo: he is a nice character that you want to know more about in the story and I dream of him, which happens, but in a very forced way that damaged the way the two protagonists met, making a super cliché

2- Secondary characters: they are all flat, a mixture of eccentric characters, they are only there for conversation, the only characters that have value in the story are the coach and the doctor, it is so much the lack of creativity that they put into
a Gals that does not paint at all in history

3- The rivals: Minamino, Tetsuo seemed to me an excellent rival just like Liu, Ryuushou from the Chinese team, pity that the character was only wasted, he was only there to mention the Olympics, the only revalidation that is seen in the anime is between Aragaki, Joutarou and Minamino, Tetsuo, the young rookie against the Veteran was well built, a fight that should have been the secondary dish because the real fight was against Liu, Ryuushou

4- The horrible music they had no idea what to put just like the animations of the OP and ED a headache

Contains spoilers!



Taiso Zamurai had a really good premise, a series about Aragaki who is a gimnast but now seems to have lost his touch and for everyone around him except for his daughter it's his time to retire.

The characters overall are really ok, Leo in particular has a very good background story and the way he interacted with Rei was cute and nice. The ninja setting was kinda weird, but after the first 3 episodes you get used to it.

My problem with the series is that we never really explored the relationship between Jotaro and Leo, they never had to time to talk about their ... ideals and inspirations, and the only moment they tried to do it, was short and rushed. I thought that maybe Jotaro would learn some of his moves by watching Leo dance, but it was not even close to that, everything was just "you can do it"and "motivation" and that was something Jotaro didn't need to begin with (Rei was already giving him that kind of support), he needed inspiration to try new things, something fresh for someone used to doing the same thing.

Also what about the main rival? well... nothing? I mean we didn't actually get to know about him, he was just there and his competitiveness was just because he somehow admired Jotaro? I think he deserved more screentime to get to care a little bit about him.

Also that last chapter was meh! really! the weird idea of chasing Leo to the airport, unnecessary. The super grandma customed car, the girl who somehow knew kung fu? everything was out of place.

The series is entertaining and fun; has some great moments, but just that, could have been better.

This show does a lot of things - and I'm not even going to say it's doing them badly - but it's doing TOO MANY without committing to ONE thing to a satisfying degree. There's the kind of sports drama in an unusual sports discipline like Yuri on Ice where a previously failed champion has to fight his way back to the top. There's the father-daughter family drama like in Himegoto where a widower is torn between working on his career and spending precious time with his young daughter. If we could ignore the sports aspect, I would also compare the overall tone to Space ... Brothers where a late-starter is trying to get into a highly competitive field with a big cast of colorful and quirky characters. But then there's the wacky hijinks featuring characters that would feel more at home in Arakawa under the Bridge, or Pyu to fuku Jaguar, including the whole sub-plot about the foreigner Leonardo who just gets dropped into the story without anybody bothering to ask what his deal is... and it's a huge deal! It would've been okay to have him avoid the topic to create more intrigue about the big mystery, but it really bugs me that nobody even TRIES to get an answer!
So even though I was really interested in Leonardo's backstory (which only gets explored in the last quarter of the series), I think the show would've actually benefitted from him not showing up at all. He admittedly hogs a lot of screentime without contributing much to the plot progression besides creating convenient contrivances, because he's just soooo quirky; Whenever an issue would get resolved naturally but the plot demands for it to be dragged out a little more, let's just have Leo barge in and interrupt the scene so it can conclude at a more dramatic point in time. Even the drama about the big finale ended up being kind of a non-issue: Leo had already found his resolve to face his demons in the previous episode and he correctly trusted in Jotaro to perform well without him, because Jotaro's performance never relied on him in the first place.
Without Leo in the picture, there would've been more screentime to focus on Jotaro's actual rival Minamino, or to give Jotaro more moments with his daughter, or to explore his daughter's resolution to become an actress, or to show more flashbacks with his deceased wife. Because all of those plotpoints get neglected way too much.

Alternatively, I don't see the point in creating a sports drama about gymnastics - a discipline that very few people care about - if you spend less than half of the time on depicting that sport itself (I'm gauging it's only around 35~40% of the screentime). So a show about Jotaro actually retiring and then focusing on his post-athlete life with his daughter and his weird freeloader ninja twink would have worked out too in my opinion.
On that note, it bothers me that the family owns a self-conscious cartoon bird that can talk, even though a dog would've filled that role just fine without damaging my suspension of disbelief. Penpen from Evangelion should be the benchmark for how far you could push unrealistic mascots outside of gag shows, and Bigbird is about 10 steps beyond that feathered biped.

If only one or two of the things I complained about got omitted, Taisou Zamurai could've had enough breathing room to focus on less things. Maybe then it could've reached a level of excellence that I've been spoiled with by 3-gatsu no Lion.

tl;dr I am a little disappointed.

Final thoughts: The OP is staying true to the established formula of being quirky and misleading about what the tone of the show would actually be like. At least the ED is making up for that a little bit.