Back in 1931, a 10 minute short called Oira no Yakyu debuted. The short is about a game of baseball between a team of rabbits and a team of tanuki. Nearly 40 years later, the Weekly Shonen Magazine manga series Star of the Giants made the leap from page to screen to become the first sports anime on television. The first televised female sports anime Attack No. 1 followed shortly thereafter.
Sports anime is a pretty broad concept, and it’s not chronicled in the same detail as magical girl and mecha anime. The development of it is hard to track. Sports anime includes gaming, so it can focus on anything from baseball to badminton to chess to card games. And thanks to anime’s genre flexibility, it can be mixed and matched with all manner of other genres.
Megalo Box is a sci-fi sports anime about a boxer in a time when boxers use mechanical frames to increase their power. Yu-Gi-Oh! is a science fantasy sports anime about a card game with links to ancient dark magic and incredible modern technology.
What you can expect is that the game, whatever it is, will be a Very Big Deal for the protagonists. There will be rivals and romances. There will be an emphasis on team work, and if it’s not a team sport, there will still be an emphasis on learning to work with and depend on the friends you practice and develop your skills with. There will also be tournament arcs.
Sports anime are also typically shonen series revolving around male protagonists in high school. But there are plenty of series that veer away from this. Series that meet the superficial requirements may still be geared toward another audience, like Free!, a swimming anime meant to appeal to a female audience.
Star of the Giants follows an ambitious baseball pitcher. Attack No. 1 is about a college volleyball team. Baseball and volleyball are both very popular subjects for sports anime.
For some reason, Wikipedia’s history of anime article lists soccer series Captain Tsubasa as the first sports anime, but the manga wasn’t written until 1981. Still, Tsubasa is a major touchstone for the genre along with other series like ’70s hit Ashita no Joe and ’90s Weekly Shonen Jump series Slam Dunk. More recent takes on the genre include currently airing Hanebado! and Harukana Receive. Recent seasons have also included Haikyu!!, Uma Musume Pretty Derby, Yowamushi Pedal and the aforementioned Megalo Box.
What does interest me and what I don’t have a clear answer for is exactly where the sports anime genre draws the line. Some sources use the gaming concept broadly and lump in anime that take place in games regardless of the type of the story they’re telling in the game. For instance, this works for Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online because its primary focus is on the competitive gaming happening in the setting. Whereas the original Sword Art Online does take place in a video game and place a heavy emphasis on game play but is lacking just about every other critical hallmark of a sports or gaming anime.
Meanwhile, the presence of competition and defined rules also doesn’t make something a sports anime by default. While the Dragon Ball franchise makes heavy use of tournament arcs, it’s clearly escalated beyond simple martial arts contests.
The appeal of sports anime seems pretty clear. Even I, who stopped playing all forms of sportsball after my 9th grade PE class, know what it’s like to compete and to work with a team. Sports anime that use existing sports rather than inventing them also provide a familiar framework for at least some of their audience. Clear rules and an apparent point system also provide the creators with tools to build drama and tension. All of this together can allow the creators to put their energy toward characterization, giving audiences the opportunity to follow strong characters through easily relatable scenarios.
I like sports anime. I’m afraid I don’t have much more to say about them. But writing this did make me realize I really want a Quidditch anime. Not the “real” version that people play in college, but the original flying broomstick version from the books. Those were the only scenes in the Harry Potter books I really hated reading, but I think I might enjoy them in anime form. Until tomorrow!
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