Hajime no Ippo or Fighting Spirit in its Western release, focuses around the timid and shy Makunouchi Ippo. He is bullied in High School and passes up spending time with his students outside of school to help his Mom (single parent) run their fishing business to make ends meet. Needless to say, one day Ippo is ganged up on by a group of bullies and takes a heavy beating. It just so happens a middleweight boxer saves him, and takes him back to the training gym. Ippo awakes and is asked to punch one of the bags, thus showing his hidden punching talent from helping out in the fishing business. Ippo strives to become stronger, and thus begins the story of Ippo’s rise in the boxing profession.
It is a powerful story, and unlike in Ashita no Joe, all of the characters from Ippo to his rivals and romantic love interest all have an interesting back story. The anime gets the viewer to care about the events taking place and the people taking part in it. This anime focuses heavily on character development and does this extremely well to say the least. From what is learned in the boxing ring between opponents, and the fact Ippo develops a habit of running into his opponents pre-match gets Ippo himself to learn about their backstory, and even sympathize with them. Due to Ippo’s character, he is never over-confident, he stays humble and timid, and always strives to train and become the best. This is unlike most shounen series where the main characters gets beat down and then gets back up to channel some unknown “anime-magic” to win.
Madhouse did something remarkable in creating a 75 episode series where the animation was consistent throughout the entire run. This ranged from the smoothness of character movement, the punches always felts they had weight behind them even during training, to the way the boxers moved while in the ring. An unreal amount of research had to have taken place to get that right. Even the music and sound effects hit all the right notes with the fights and the viewer always creating an “edge of your seat” environment to really get that blood pumping.
Ippo is a shounen anime, so the pacing can crawl at times. The same routine can be seen in the generic story formula, i.e. Ippo trains, backstory, Ippo fights, fallout, repeat. Ippo as a character isn’t overly appealing as much as his rivals are, and while the start is strong, the rest of the anime very much sticks to said formula. Not to say this isn’t exciting and captivating, but some might find it boring at times. Hajime no Ippo is miles above what other sports anime have brought such as Ashita no Joe. If sports anime is among a genre favourite, then there is no doubt Hajime no Ippo is a pure winner.
