Aim For The Ace S1+S2+Movie + Final Stage - Anime Review
The first thing that I would like to get off my chest, is that this anime series is a personal favourite of mine. As I own a Hiromi Oka anime garage kit, and fell in love with this anime series. My initial draw to this anime is the director Osamu Dezaki. Osamu Dezaki has directed some of my other favourite anime series Dear Brother, Ashita No Joe, The Snow Queen and Rose of Versailles. Even though Osamu Dezaki didn’t direct all of this anime series, I still love this anime series. Despite only finding out about this anime series five years ago, I own all the region two DVD’s of this anime series. What I love about this anime series is the hand drawn animation (animation cell), music, character design and most of all, the characters.
As this anime series follows the manga, I liked how the characters in this series have an actual wardrobe. A weakness of this series is the actual tennis animation. As this series animation is cell based, some tennis rallies are repeated animation of a tennis rally, but this is gone in the movie, and final stage (ova). I thought that the character growth of Hiomi in this series is excellent. Hiromi starts out as a tennis player not taking tennis seriously. It is Hiromi’s coach that forces her to take serious, and turn pro. Hiromi faces many obstacles throughout her rise from an amateur, to a tennis professional. I won’t mention all the obstacles that Hiromi has to meet and clear to reach her dream of a tennis professional, but the ending of the series is simply worth the wait IMO. I thought that the tennis match’s overall in the series was where well animated for its time. I thought that the booklets that come with the anime’s DVD set were a nice supplement, despite being an old anime series. My favourite scene from this series is many, but I liked Aim For The Ace Final Stage last ten minutes of the final episode, as Hiromi is able to make her dreams a reality. During this series, I liked watching Hiromi interact with her pet cat, as I found the interaction between the two characters light, funny and enjoyable.
Overall, I’m really glad that I own all of this anime series on Japanese DVD, and I would recommend this anime to fans of sports anime, drama and for fans who can stomach cell animation.