Note that this is the 'review' for how I in particular consumed the Ashita no Joe series; that being reading the first 8 or so volumes of the manga, then episodes 51-54 of the anime's season 1, then finally this, the anime's season 2. I may later read the latter 12 volumes of the manga and reevaluate. Ashita no Joe is a classic for a reason, it's written around the beautifully tragically written protagonist, who many have said to be constructed in a Shakespearean fashion and level of quality, and I'd be inclined to agree. The introductory 8 volumes beautifully establish who Joe is as a person and as a character, a concept, carefully sowing the seeds for his development to come. The latter stretch of the story systematically pays this setup off, each new boxer and corresponding fight challenging and exploring a slightly different aspect of his development, and every story beat in between fleshing it all out and stitching the series together.
Character Analysis:
Joe as a character is constructed very nicely. He's one of those figures who toes the line between being a human for us to relate to and a hero for us to look up to, and it uses the latter expectations to allow his downfall, subverting certain Shounen tropes surrounding our and the cast's view of the hero in a similar - and surely inspirtational - manor to one of my favourite characters, Gon Freecss. He's slowly failed by everyone and everything around him, and himself as a result of others' ill nurture; initially by fate, abandoned by his parents, and then more subtly by Tange, who is a very effective example of a present but irresponsible father figure, unknowingly yet relentlessly building up Joe's reliance on boxing as a measure of his self worth merely for his own self-satisfaction. Further he is failed similarly by Yoko, who pushes his obsession in order to satisfy her regret over Rikiishi while ironically performing the exact same shallow enabling that gets him killed in the first place, and he's failed on a large scale by all the others around him who rely on him as an inspiration, even more so establishing boxing as something that makes him bigger than he was before, redirecting his newfound life satisfaction away from the happy family life that he's ultimately striving for internally and towards the self-destructive celebration of what he thinks is human satisfaction, but is also a representation of his clinging to the immature self-abandoning solitude that was his coping mechanism for so long.
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His is the story of a traumatised child who fails to adjust to the fortune that has at last been bestowed upon him, due to the ignorance of those now responsible for him in favour of satisfying their own boredom within the confines of a safe society. When he meets Rikiishi they meet from opposite sides; Joe channelling his newfound worth into challenging the embodiment of betterment after hitting rock bottom, Rikiishi attempting to face his own baser desires by challenging the embodiment of abandoning oneself to said desires in order to survive. Significantly Rikiishi wins (showing the correctness of that self-betterment) but dies (showing the danger of abandoning the safety of civilisation), which sets Joe onto the path of maturation, grounding him to the beliefs and understanding of the danger of what he's been doing until now. From this point he's given many chances to quit, and we're subtly told constantly that this would be the best path for him; playing with the kids, getting a job at the shop, relaxing on the beach or in the mountains - there's happiness all around him but it's not enough now because of how intrinsically tied his self worth is to boxing. When Yoko goes and fetches him Carlos the damage is more than done. He finds something more worth living for than ever before, and when that disappears he struggles to ever have a purpose again. Jose is the ultimate embodiment of comfort of life, something that Joe clearly respects and envies, but challenging him to boxing is all he can do to strive towards it. In the end he traumatises Jose with his grim resolve and abandon for his own life, and after all that still loses. He dies defeated and smiling sadly, burnt out. He couldn't even become Rikiishi in the end, his last actions gave nothing but negativity to himself and all around him. As humans, we can't live unexamined, boundless and hedonistic. We need to understand ourselves and others, or we'll lose our others and ourselves. Nobody is happy when the outcome is fruitless death
Review: With that done, let's talk about the actual qualities of the series. The manga's art is awesome, bold-lined and with multi-panelled movement, with a really nice art style that delivers expressions decently well. The anime visuals are really good too, super smooth animation that holds up today and some really nice colouring too (nothing notable about the camerawork), however the expressions aren't perfect; some of Joe's are good, but Yoko's in particular caused me to massively misread what the show was trying to tell me (though I'm sure that's largely due to her character being a lot worse than I'd hoped). I liked the splash visuals at the end of each episode and before some breaks, those were seriously beautiful and one of them in particular was the only reason I caught on to the right and left eye motif (right eye = base hedonistic desires [e.g. Tange only ever sees through his right eye] left eye = grounded analytical perspective [Joe's hair often covers his right when he introspects but covers his left when burning with fighting passion]).
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The characters other than Joe were *mostly* good; obviously all of the opponents served well for Joe thematically but only Rikiishi, Carlos and Jose stand on their own (maaaaaybe Kim as well), Harimau however is one of the most ridiculously racist caricatures I've ever seen; Danpei was frustrating to watch and I really hated him but I can't deny he's a pretty good character that way; Goromaki Gondo was really solid actually; Yoko could've been better, I really liked her dynamic with Joe in early S2 but the romantic twist was cliche and stupid; Nishi was good for what he was, as was Noriko and the kids (though they were a bit annoying sometimes), and Kiyoshi was a cool addition too. The story and progression was mostly very good, but there were persistent stretches in which I kind of lost interest. Idk if that was just a me problem because I can't think of any tangible dramaturgical reason for it to fall off in these places other than losing my patience with its nitty gritty shortcomings, but they were there and killed the flow a bit. For criticisms such as that though, you have to bear in mind that I'd effectively been spoiled on the ending of AnJ long before ever starting it, so many lapses in investment can be specified as being because I essentially already knew where the character was going.
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Now for the more surface-level problems it has. First of all, the dialogue is quite bad sometimes. It does that typical Shounen thing where it painstakingly overexplains every little detail of the events unfolding, and that seriously bothers me. On a similar note, the Engrish is comically awful. It's blatantly obvious that they didn't run the English lines past a single person who's actually fluent, it's very hard to take seriously for a large number of important scenes. On the bright side, it's very funny, and I got to make a game out of reviewing every English speaker on their line delivery. Finally, of one the most noticeable problems with the anime is the soundtrack usage. Now the soundtrack itself is very good (especially the song with a lot of bass and the one that's starting accompaniment sounds like a cool remix of Mamma Mia) but it has like 10 songs max, including the OPs and EDs, so naturally it has to milk every one of them dry over its 16 hour runtime. That makes for a tiring watch sometimes, and frankly aside from writing more songs it should've made much better use of silence. Btw it also gets a bit tiring how every other episode ends with Joe running somewhere and Danpei shouting "Joe! Joe! Jooooooooeeeeee!!!" after him. Largely though, I really like the voice acting performances (excepting the Engrish), though similar to the expressions of the characters it's not necessarily remarkable. You get a good idea of the emotions and struggles of the characters, but after recently reading Nana I can't in good conscience say AnJ does that particularly well.
Conclusion: Ashita no Joe is a classic for a reason. It has a legendary protagonist with a movingly told journey, and its influence can be found everywhere in manga and anime released since. As clever as the writing is however, a lot of the finer details could have been handled better (in both mediums, I know I made it seem as if many of the faults were localised to the anime, but my biggest problems with it remain to be those with the dialogue and story beats rather than the anime's occasional instances of dodgy execution amongst what overall seems like a worthy adaptation). 9/10 may well be too generous a score, but what it achieves despite its shortcomings is well worth the hype
