OLD - Review of "Ping Pong - the Animation" and reflections on Growing Up - 2021-01-10

’Recently watched my second anime ever, Ping Pong. I have to say, I’m growing fond of this type of series where there’s 10-20 episodes that fulfill a complete story-line and then it just ends. It feels way more polished than the type of shows that are common in the west, where they have a vague idea that gets made into a pilot and if it gets picked off the show will be milked for all that it’s worth. Obviously this doesn’t happen to all shows, and it happens in Japan too, but either way they’re definitely the best kind of shows to watch. I will try to leave the review spoiler-free, but to spoil my own review I’d rate the show 10/10 and recommend anyone to watch it before continuing with the rest of the review.

Ping Pong is, in short, about Ping Pong. Primarily about High-school students in Japan playing in the championships, somethings that turns out to be a surprisingly close-knitted community. However, don’t get confused, Ping Pong is just the way the show chooses to present it’s primary topics. In essence this is nothing shallower than how you relate to life, and how it makes all the difference in the world. The show has such a depth in characters that I can’t even begin to capture, but we follow different Ping-pong players on their life from the view of ping-pong. Some of these players play like their life depended on it, often being caught with quotes such as “Defeat is death” and taking victory for granted, while others just see it as a hobby to get them through High-school. Some players have an amazing talent that they take for granted, while others work themselves to the bones trying to keep up with the competition. We see how the players start to get hung-up in their life as they grow up, how the thing they have in common transforms from the love of ping-pong to the hate of defeat. This, to me, is the essence of the show and what really caught my eye. Before continuing on with reflections on this very topic I just have to concretely talk about the qualities of the show. The character development and in general how fleshed out every character was is something not often seen. I was amazed by how subtle the development was, and how effortlessly and naturally it happened. The aesthetics were in general also really good, but it took some time for the show to build up momentum in this department. By the end though, I caught myself singing along to the intro in Japanese. The story, plot, was in my eyes mostly an excuse for the in-depth character analysis, which it managed to do flawlessly. Not sure how to divide the plot/character development though, so I will leave it at this.

It seems like a common theme is how you forget the reason why you started doing something. More concretely put, we could see how all of the characters are were they are because of their love of ping-pong. While we can see it, more often than not what happens while the characters grow up is that they forget this themselves. They get caught up in their careers and the general drama of life, which gets manifest in heartbreaking facts like the world-champion not even enjoying winning the championship and instead being constantly bombarded with dread and anxiety of losing even just once.

This is something I think about a lot, it’s actually quite scary. Time and time again we see how growing up destroys innocence, crushes motivation and just in general lessens a person. Life just gets more and more complicated, and it’s so easy to slip off the path and so damn hard to get back. I think this is part of why society idolizes children, they’re just so amazingly pure, which is to say, honest. It’s safe to say that it has become a cliche that children vow to never become like their parents and then find themselves in that exact spot. Which is something I think is just one of the ways that this problem is shown. We get caught up in the unimportant stuff, in the drama of life, and forget what used to matter. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things we do and should grow out of, it’s not unreasonable that your love for playing in a sandbox fades as you grow up. However it’s the deeper things, like how life used to be, and is supposed to be, fun. Instead we take it all too seriously and still question why more and more people feel depressed. It’s like we forget that there’s a difference between being alive and living. But I get it, and that’s the crux of the problem. Living goes from effortless to really fucking hard. The answer isn’t to run away from your problems though, but to face them head on. Don’t lock up your emotions but instead let them out, good as well as bad. Pain and pleasure are one thing, but suffering, suffering comes from straining against life, from trying to avoid the pain. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather feel twice the pain and pleasure than nothing at all. And I believe this is inherent, we try so hard to run away from the pain that we miss the fact that we’re running away from the pleasure in the process. In the end we turn into shells of our former selves, bottling up our feelings and forgetting that life didn’t always feel like this. Or maybe even worse, remembering how good it used to be and being painfully aware of how low we’ve fallen. Sorry to end on such a sad note, but that’s all I got for today.