Hajime no Ippo / Fighting Spirit - 9/10
It isn't really a surprise that Ippo turned out to be a great series, despite its length - going into the series I was well aware of how highly regarded it is - but I do find myself a little surprised to see me rating it 9/10. My head told me to rate it 8-8.5/10 because, despite being incredibly enjoyable to watch and excellent to marathon because of how straightforward it is, it has a number of flaws. But, in the end, my heart won over my mind and, at the end of the series, I felt it deserved a score closer to top marks than 8/10.
There's nothing original about Ippo. It's a boxing story about a loser becoming winner, finding both glory and love as he moves forward with each fight, also making friends with his rivals. If you've seen Rocky then you've pretty much seen the same sort of story already, albeit with minor changes such as the age and situation the main character finds himself in at the start. But the lack of originality and repetitive nature of a series that progresses by showing training, a fight, an episode or two of humourous content and then repeats the process until the end doesn't stop it being excellent to watch. If done right, original or not, a story of a boy finding something worth living for and growing as he moves towards his dream will always appeal, and the story of Ippo was executed as good as can be imagined, on the boxing side at least.
There are a few issues I have, though. The first is the lack of episodes not focused on training and fights. There just wasn't enough episodes showing Ippo away from the ring. Even at the start, when he was shown getting bullied, there wasn't enough time given to flrshing out his character - I didn't feel sorry for Ippo because so little was shown of him as a weak victim. It's a shame because the episodes showing Ippo getting to know Kumi - his future love - and the backstory episodes for the cast were some of my favourites in the series. It's a strange complaint to make about a boxing anime but there was just too much boxing.
My other complaint is to do with the animation. Although the fights were entertaining for the most part because of Ippo either needing a certain tactic or just pure dermination to beat the talented fighters he came up against, I wasn't able to get fully into a lot because of the subpar animation. Too often I either found myself seeing still-shots being giving the illusion of motion by panning or short fight animations getting looped. I understand the budgets for anime are low in general and Ippo lasted for a lot longer than most but it still made me think how great some of the fights would've been with free flowing animation. On the brightside, at the least the final fight was epic.
...so, yeah, I liked Ippo a lot. I'm glad I own most of the series on DVD. I'm going to watch the two specials and then move onto the 25 episodes second season, which is still airing at the moment. I picked a good time to have a look and become a fan of Ippo!
P.S: The shows humour is just...weird. For the most part, the majority of the laughs come from jokes about Ippo's penis, unzipped flies and, rather disturbingly, Takamura receiving multiple phoadvantage of them. Only in Japan is date rape turned into a joke.
