English Dub Season Review: The Gymnastics Samurai Season One

I should be upfront with something: I didn’t go into reviewing this show with the best mindset. Part of that was it being a rather sudden assignment, part of it being that it didn’t look particularly good aesthetically, and another being that the episodes came out pretty inconsistently at the beginning as Funimation still struggled with releasing things on a steady basis. A lot of those sorts of things are going to impact how you view a series from a critical level, but most of them were not the show’s fault. And now that I have had a chance to go back and rewatch the entire season over the course of a week (as I like to do to get ready for a season review, it’s clear that there are a lot of pretty cool and interesting things about this series that I did not give their due credit at the time. Hopefully this review of the series as a whole will act as my way of rectifying that.

The Gymnastics Samurai follows Jotaro Aragaki, a professional gymnast in 2003 who is now over the hill. He used to be a star in the sport, even earning the title “Samurai” for his unique choice of hairstyle (which is pretty weak as a reason, but whatever). After a massive slip up and a shoulder injury that made his star fall from grace, he is given immense pressure to retire, trying to work up the courage to explain to his daughter, who he raises alone after his wife died. That changes when he meets Leo, a self-described “ninja” who encourages him to not give up, which gives him the courage to postpone his retirement and keep going. Over the course of the series, Jotaro learns how to surpass his previous limits and even learns more about Leo’s past, allowing the two to inspire each other to reclaim the passion they once had for their respective careers.

At its core, this show is about finding out what one truly wants to become and facing it, even if the drive wavers for many different reasons. Jotaro wishes to stay a gymnast, despite his previous failures, and finds the strength to continue from relying on others and focusing on his love of the sport instead of the drive to win. Leo, as it is later revealed, wishes to be a dancer, as he was a prodigy from a young age. However, intense pressure from others led him to run away from the career, hence his falling back on the “ninja” stuff, which he thinks will let him hide in the shadows. But once Joe, his daughter Rei, and the rest of Leo’s found family help him face things and know he’s not alone, he’s able to embrace it. Even Rei has a bit of development in that she learns her own passion, wanting to be an actress like her deceased mother. It’s a prevalent theme throughout the season that is handled quite well, though it took me another rewatch to fully get that.

That said, there are still some problems that have stuck in my mind even with a newfound respect for it. A consistent irk of mine of the show is that there are a lot of elements that feel disparate and out of place. This story is technically a period piece, taking place in the early 2000’s and making references to it with then-contemporary movies and even the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, but these things don’t really add much to the plot and just end up seeming odd. It also never quite helped me to really understand gymnastics very well, or at least not on a level where I could follow along with much of the “action”, as it were. I don’t expect the series to make me an expert on the subject in just 11 episodes, but there had to be some way of explaining some of the more hard to read jargon so that I could at least know what to look out for, aside from one gymnastics move being somewhat more significant than another. The characters have to hold the story together, which they do well enough ultimately, but there was probably more to be done on the immersion end of things.

In the end, I think it’s safe to say that this is a bit of a hidden gem amongst 2020 anime. It’s not a very popular premise and it doesn’t exactly execute itself as well as it could, but it’s got strong and important themes with a handful of likable characters and others who are perfectly innocuous and make themselves known with strong personalities. I don’t expect we’ll be seeing much of this series in the future, but it was a pretty interesting show while it lasted. There are lessons to be learned from it, both in writing and in life, though who knows if enough people watched it to really stick. Regardless, it was still a solid performance.