Spotlight Anime: Yawara!

I feel a winner. A champion! It was one year, one hundred and twenty four episodes... And I finished it! I always feel a great relief when I finish such long series. Especially when they are from the 80s. On the case, 80s and 90s, since the series goes on through four years. As in the story as in reality, as it was on TV from 1989 to 1992.

This is a series about judo. Yawara is a judo prodigy. His father was champion and disappeared. His grandfather was champion and trains her under a though comedic reginmen. But Yawara does not care about judo. She only wants to be a normal girl, do girl things, go to college, fall in love, those things. That's why she's a "fashionable judo girl", subtitle of the series.

Through all these episodes we follow her growth as person and judo player. Even though in judo there is not a lot for her to get better, since it's established since the beggining that she's a genius. In reality, we never see her lose. So, the fights are all very previsible. Many parallel stories exist, normally a love triangle and the search for the lost father. Also the little stories about her friends' lives. These friends give a little bit of spice to the fights, since on their case we never know if they will win or lose.

The animation suffers a lot with repeated frames, a recurrent problem in long running series. However, they are well used and are not boring. The technique itself is very acceptable. What is actually interesting are the facial expressions of the characters, which have a great range and bring a lot of comical effect.

In musical terms, we have a great variety of OPs and EDs, that get stuck on our heads are really good pop. One of them in special, I'm still singing it. The sound effects during the fights and everything else are a bit repetitive, wich is also a normal recurrent problem.

In general, an anime representative of it's time, that distinguishes amongst the genre for it's realism and human facet. If it was not so long, I'd recommend it.