WTF was I doing in 2014...
If anyone has noticed, I have been complaining about how rote, cliche and boring anime has become for quite awhile. There have been some good series in recent years but not enough to say the anime industry is in the throes of a creative flourish. I had all but given up on anime as a unique medium to be honest. The biggest shows to come out in recent memory is Attack on Titan and One Punch Man. For one reason or another, these series didnt resonate with me and I just put it down to age. Instead, I became content relying on nostalgia like Digimon Tri, DB Super etc to get my cheap anime thrills and thus I became part of the problem.
Queue holiday period of 2015, and my friend gave me the boxset of Ping Pong the Animation. I threw it in the corner of a room and didnt think twice about it. After having a really bad hangover from New Year's celebration, I was looking for something to watch until my hangover wore off. I decided to watch Ping Pong the Animation and within about 5 minutes of watching I was gripped. After marathoning straight to episode 10, I became scared to watch the last episode because I didnt want it to end. By the end of episode 11, I became teary eyed (which is rare for me to react to anything like that) and started ruminating on aspects of my life. I remember, this is what anime use to be for me. Things that made me think and feel like only anime/animation could.
I had a quick look online and I saw cursory things about a controversy surrounding the artstyle. To me, the artstyle is perfect and embellishes the themes of the show as a unique experience. When somebody tells me an anime has particularly good animation, I can rarely tell because once upon a time, animation in anime were distinct and varied in artstyles from series to series leaving me with a unique impression. These days, everything looks generic (i.e character designs), almost as if anime has been standardised across the board with the lowest common denominator in mind. Even if a show had good animation, it stopped feeling unique, therefore I stopped looking for good animation in shows and truth be told, didnt care. If a person has a problem with the artstyle of this show, I think they are missing the point of what makes anime/ animation in general a unique medium.
But to go back to the opener... WTF was I doing in 2014 when it was released? Why did I almost miss out on a show that was so perfectly attuned to my sensibilities. And a scarier thought is...what else have I been missing out on because I havent been digging to find those gems. Even after a short time with Ping Pong the Animation, there is no doubt in my head that it is one of the best anime series I have ever watched. All I really want to do is find the time to watch it again...