Anime Alphabet - A is for Attack No. 1

The first-ever shoujo sports series; its influence can be felt over the rest of anime history

(This post was written as a script for the edited video above, which provides a more complete experience of the post’s subject. The text version below is just for easier reference and comprehension for anyone in need.)

Japanese animation has a history spanning more than a hundred years--and for the last quarter of those I’ve been trying to catch up with all of the good stuff, constantly rediscovering classics and hidden gems and then trying to help them greater recognition within the English-speaking anime fanbase. With hundreds of worthwhile shows to talk about, though, even if I only wanted to make in-depth videos about absolute classics for the rest of my time on Youtube, it would be really difficult to decide which shows to choose in what order; so to make things easier for myself, I’m going in alphabetical order, choosing one classic show that caught my fancy per letter, and clarifying what constitutes its classic status. My name is Trixie, the Golden Witch, you can find my writing on goldenwitch.substack.com, and this is Anime Alphabet.

--A IS FOR ATTACK NO. 1--

Let me take you back to Japan at the tail end of the 1960s. Manga has been gaining popularity as a storytelling medium since the early 50s thanks to the unparalleled success of manga God Osamu Tezuka, whose comics in both magazines for young boys and girls would make those demographics the primary consumers of manga. Some of the most popular manga were adapted for television via animation in the early 60s, starting with Astro Boy’s 193 episode run from 1963. For the following few years, action-driven sci-fi shows for children formed the bulk of anime’s existence, until more contemporary comedies like the original Osomatsu-kun, and the first anime aimed at young girls, magical girl prototype Sally the Witch, became popular as well.

The Summer of 1967 saw the birth of anime sports with the start of Speed Racer, followed in the coming years by wresting anime Animal 1 & Tiger Mask, and baseball series Kyoujin no Hoshi. 1967 also solidified the popularity of shoujo adaptations with Tezuka’s Princess Knight. At that point, the stage had been set for the creation of the shoujo sports genre. Thanks to Japan’s win at the 1964 Olympics in women’s volleyball, that sport was chosen as the focal point for the very first popular sports manga for girls, Attack No. 1, which started publication in Margaret magazine toward the end of 1969, and whose anime adaptation went to air a year later in 1970. Pulling in 20% of TV ratings during the height of its run, Attack no. 1 was massively popular and successful, would be translated and broadcast in many countries outside Japan, and inspired no shortage of volleyball players, manga artists and animation staff.

In fact, I became interested in watching Attack no. 1 because of a panel by legendary voice actress Kikuko Inoue, whom you may know from playing Kasumi Tendou or Belldandy or Lust in Brotherhood, or any of this, and she remarked that Kobato Kurumi’s performance of the main character in Attack No. 1 had first inspired her to start voice acting, based on how strongly she connected to the character through the performance. Her passion in describing the memory of Attack no. 1 gave me a desire to see it myself; and as soon as I started it up, I realized exactly how the character of Ayuhara Kozue might inspire a young creative person.

Attack No. 1 introduces us to Ayuhara-san as a disaffected student newly transferred into a middle school she doesn’t get along with, despite her considerable intelligence. When a teacher tries to bust her for sleeping, she turns the tables and dunks on him, leading a group of slightly delinquent girls calling themselves the “useless bunch” to immediately recruit her into their group as champion. She meets a prospective boyfriend and relative (because 60s Japan be like that), whom, while emotionally supportive, is worried about the influence the useless girls might have on Ayuhara-san--as are her teachers, who want her to have a better attitude considering her intelligence. Given how much fun she has chilling with the useless girls and how much they respect her, all of the doubters only serve to fuel Ayuhara-san in defending of her new friends--especially when the Volleyball club gets upset at her for dissing their performance from the sidelines, and challenges her to prove her worth on the volleyball court with all five of her useless friends.

What immediately grabbed me about Ayuhara Kozue is just how much of a hardass she is. Lots of 70s anime dramas focus on innocent young people just trying to do their best, but being beset on all sides by evil assholes that just want to ruin their lives. Kozue is certainly someone that people are inclined to target, but she’s not about to get pushed around or told what to do for more than a couple of seconds. When she hears people talking shit, she walks right up and confronts them; when her friends are acting kind of shaky, she points it out and encourages them to do better; and when she and her useless friends get challenged to a volleyball match, she starts whipping them into shape and taking no complaints.

Over the next two episodes, we learn more about what motivates Kozue to be so intense all the time. As it turns out, she used to be at the top of an even more prestigious middle school than the already decent one she’s transferred to, but had to move out to the countryside from Tokyo to recover from an unspecified injury. Finding this out almost shakes the trust of her useless allies, but she quickly roots that attitude out by reminding them how she’s still their friend; and finding out that she’s playing volleyball again gets her in trouble with the family members that she’s staying with and her doctor--at least until it turns out that a month of intensive volleyball training has actually healed her. My guess is that her drive to succeed repaired her body like Gurren-Lagann.

At first it doesn’t seem like the useless girls have the drive compete in a serious volleyball match, with two of them nearly quitting from the physical intensity of training. When the volleyball girls start a rumor that Ayuhara was expelled from her previous school, though, it’s all Kozue can do to keep her girls from getting into an all-out brawl with them, insisting they pour their feelings into the match. After tons of built-up tension between the two groups and all the near-cancellations of the match, it finally gets under way, with a considerable audience of interested teachers, students, and friends. The volleyball team, having taken the threat of prep school defector Ayuhara seriously, is bringing their all, and is poised to just curb-stomp Kozue’s team--the pressure of being watched and jeered at from the sidelines getting to them.

Ayuhara won’t let her team get spooked, though, and regroups to remind them what they trained for and devise a comeback strategy. As the bad girls shake their opponents’ confidence with a reminder of their ferociously rebellious attitude, they start to turn the match around; and, after a grueling ‘bout, with the crowds’ cheers, led by Kozue’s not-boyfriend, backing them, the useless girls’ club eventually emerges victorious. Huddled together in excitement and disbelief over their accomplishment, as the volleyball team slinks off with heads hung low, one of the girls proclaims that it’s the first time she’s ever felt this sense of victory. In that moment, Kozue realizes that this match might have meant even more to her team than it did to her.

In a surprise turnaround gesture, the volleyball club’s members then offer their respect to Kozue’s team, apologizing for having teased them up until this point, and inviting them all to join the currently all-senior volleyball team, with Kozue as the new captain. Everyone agrees to take this road to competitive self-betterment together, and once the girls have all joined up, they quickly set their sights on the national competition for their next goal. That is, right before they hear this going on outside the gym…

(Midori spiking ball)

Hayakawa Midori is an absolute volleyball machine, and she makes it clear from the moment she’s back in town that she intends to rob the captain position from Kozue. Rich and relentless, Midori immediately gets the formerly useless, now very serious about volleyball club to turn on Kozue by lying that she’d privately claimed to have saved all of them from expulsion. Ironically the older club members who already know about Midori stand up for Kozue this time; but for a moment, Kozue’s confidence is actually shaken. With Hayakawa’s skill in sports and manipulation, and her access to seemingly endless wealth, it’s possible in Kozue’s mind that she really is a better fit to be captain of the team. 

This conflict takes a surprising turn when Midori’s father invites Kozue and the other senior club members to his house, whereupon he admits that he sent his daughter to this school with the hopes that she’d be able to take over their volleyball club and use it to become famous. Incensed by this disrespect for the sport. Kozue immediately turns down his offer to buy her whatever she wants if she can make his daughter famous and storms out--but Midori changes strategies and actually does the right thing, apologizing to Kozue and asking her to stay in the club because, whether she gets to be the leader or not, she needs a player as powerful as Kozue on her team to achieve her goal of getting famous.

Even if she still isn’t sympathetic, we at least know Midori is serious enough about her goals to recognize the need of other people to accomplish them. Granted, we quickly realize that she barely gets this idea when she makes everyone else wait for her to practice on her own the day before a match--not revealing until midway into said match that it’s her first one ever, because no one’s ever been brave enough to team up with her. By this point, Kozue has pretty much resolved that Midori is, in fact, ruining the volleyball team, and she’s not sure what she can do about it--that is, until an interested teacher starts begging the principal to let him start coaching.

Even though his only experience is in baseball, Hongou-sensei is so confident he can repair the damaged relationships of the volleyball girls and get them to competitive level that he assures his boss “you’ll certainly get promoted if you let me do this. You just have to let me use whatever methods I see fit.” Hongou-sensei’s methods, it turns out, have a lot in common with those of J.K. Simmons’ character from Whiplash. When Kozue and Midori start squabbling, the coach gives the entire team three more laps and drives them past the point of collapse. Two girls immediately quit, a complaint goes to the PTA, and the former captain gets to the point where she has to scold Midori and Kozue for continuing to squabble when the bigger problem of the maniacal coach is tearing their team apart. After watching him terrorize one of the weaker girls to the point of sadism, the eight remaining team members finally unite in their desire to have him step down as coach--which he agrees to do, provided they can win a next-day exhibition match against a much more powerful school.

At first, the individual strength of Kozue and Midori is enough to keep Fujimi middle school on the winning side--but as soon as the opponents start marking the two of them, their offense completely falls apart. Left without a coach to guide them, and with Midori humbled by her continued stumping at the enemy’s hands, Kozue has to devise a plan, eventually using the other girls to smokescreen her and Midori’s combination advances. In the end they pull through, with the proud teacher leaving before the match is over as he intends to honor his promise to stand down as coach, admitting his hubris. 

However, in light of their victory, the volleyball club quickly agrees that it was only possible because of how strong the coach had made them through his intensive training--and moreover, that Kozue and Midori’s teamwork attacks were core to their victory. Midori finally comes to truly understand the meaning of teamwork and apologizes to everyone; and then, in one of those classically heartwarming dramatic scenes on the beach, the girls finally embrace their asshole coach and are united in earnest.

This first six-episode arc of the team coming together perfectly sets the tone for what to expect from the moment-to-moment experience of Attack no. 1. My favorite thing about it is how many interactions amount to Kozue trying to hold her teammates back from getting into fights by telling them to settle it in sports--and how seriously everyone takes the sports as a result of their personal off-court beefs. Matches are tense and bitter fights, where arrogance and egos are pitted against one-another, ending in tears of victory, or bitter tears of vexation over defeat. At any given time, someone or everyone in the show is usually frustrated about something and ready to have a fight over it if they can’t find a better way to deal with it.

Kozue’s dedication to keeping her team together and strong is always admirable, and watching Midori get furious with her own limitations is a lot of fun. The artwork and animation are pretty simplistic and straightforward, but well-paced and directed, with matches that are usually quick and comprehensible without any filler, unlike the overlong, over-dramatic matches of some other volleyball shows. The voice performances are always pretty intense, as tends to be the case with a lot of these older shows, and the music does well to unscore dramatic moments. This certainly isn’t a show that you’d revisit for the production value, though--what makes it exciting is the magnetic personalities of the main characters, and the quickly-paced, complex social drama that plays out through its volleyball sports narrative.

The second five-episode arc opens with the older members of the volleyball club graduating at the start of a new school year, while Fujimi middle school unexpectedly receives a merging in of another school’s students, including their powerful volleyball team known for its Big Four, led by the aggressive emo girl Izumi. These four laugh-happy arrogant assholes immediately cause sparks with the other girls, and as is typical of conflict in Attack no. 1, the girls try to settle their feelings in a volleyball match--but the big four is too much for the team with fewer great players to handle, and Kozue suffers her most frustrating loss to date.

Amid this drama with the new club members, Kozue and Midori happen upon a university team’s practice match on the beach. After jumping in and proving themselves impressive, they get invited to come to the team’s training camp over summer break. Here we see a powerful bond begin to develop between the teammates, as Midori views Kozue’s successes as part of her own in having her as a friend, and Kozue’s endless determination to master Izumi’s special serving technique leads her to keep pushing herself and Midori past the point of passing out. By the time they’ve got their technique down, they’re sharing hugs and showing up together just about everywhere as BFFs.

Arriving more powerful than ever, the Attack Duo challenges the Big Four and beats them almost immediately when Izumi injures herself after the first point and forfeits, without revealing why to even her teammates. They try to question her, but she ends up storming away and leaving the volleyball club altogether. The rest of the Big Four are poised to leave as well, but in the same way that Midori amd Kozue had become desperate to make amends to keep their team strong, Kozue pursues the Big Four adamantly with the intent of keeping them on the team. Communication proves difficult between her and the stubborn students, but knowing that they could only have gotten so powerful through a sincere love of volleyball, Kozue refuses to believe that they shouldn’t be able to connect with them, and eventually convinces them to come around by challenging one of the girls to stab a volleyball with a knife--which of course proves too intense for these three volleyball fanatics.

With most of the team together, the girls are strong enough to handle the couple of preliminary matches they have on their way to the tournament--yet not one of them can get through to Izumi, who we learn doesn’t have a very good relationship with her stepmom, insisting that the stepmom hates her and wants her to quit volleyball. Kozue also catches her would-be boyfriend, Inukami-kun, fraternizing with Izumi, and begins to suspect that they might be dating, which she is not the least bit happy about. It is apparent that Inukami knows about Izumi’s secret, but he refuses to say anything.

After winning their first preliminary match, Kozue and Midori find out that their opponents had been directly given information about their weaknesses from Izumi--and they confirm this when they overhear her doing the same thing with their next-day opponents in a cafe, leading to my favorite scene of furious water-finishing ever from Midori.

Knowing they’ve been sold out, Kozue changes her team’s strategy and pulls through the match, afterwards telling Inukami about what they’d witnessed. He joins Kozue and Midori to try confronting Izumi again, who runs home screaming that no one understands her before Inukami finally spills the beans to the girls about her injury. After exploding at her dad and stepmom that she must have told the doctor to prescribe that she quit volleyball for six months, Izumi runs off into the woods by a cliffside, where Kozue and Midori find her, leading to my favorite moment in the show so far.

Kozue immediately assesses that the real reason Izumi is so bitter is because she joined the track and field club after having left the volleyball club, but hadn’t seen the same success there which she’d had in the former club. Izumi retorts that she couldn’t give her all to track and field because she isn’t as passionate about it as volleyball--but Kozue blasts her attitude, stating that if she isn’t capable of giving her absolute best to whatever she’s doing, then she doesn’t deserve to be doing any of it in the first place. To prove Izumi’s cowardice, she them challenges her to a hundred-meter dash.

Losing this race finally gets through to Izumi, who promises that she will never stop running. And that’s a good thing, too, because Inukami, shoring up the rear with the girls’ parents, reveals that she actually will never be able to play volleyball again. Her mom didn’t have the heart to admit it and was hoping to simply talk her out of the sport over that supposed six-month break. Confronted with this reality, Izumi at once realizes that her mom really did care about not just her, but the insane passion for volleyball that accelerated her wrist disease in first place, and resolves to find as much passion to compete in track and field as she has for volleyball.

This brings us to the beginning of the next three-episode mini-arc, in which the Fujimi middle school volleyball team competes in Japan’s national tournament. This arc is more structurally similar to the types of stories still common in team sports anime, introducing a rival team with a standout member known for a certain special technique and hyping them up over the first half of the arc before their dramatic final battle against our main characters. As such, I think it makes a good opportunity to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of Attack no. 1 as a sports anime.

Given that Attack no. 1 was literally like the fourth sports anime ever created, it’s hard not to think that it had to be massively influential on the genre, given how many stories still use the same storytelling structure, pacing and tone of matches, and animation ideas invented in this series. I don’t know that anyone had even attempted animating volleyball before this show existed; and since I’m writing this in 2021 and you care enough about anime to be more than fifteen minutes into a video about a show from the 70s, you are most likely aware that volleyball is now one of the activities most thoroughly and inventively brought to animation thanks to the utterly ridiculous effort given by Production I.G. into animating Haikyuu. 

Needless to say, the quality of volleyball conveyed in Attack no. 1 can’t even slightly compare to what’s on display in Haikyuu, but aside from the fact that the girls in Attack no. 1 are constantly taking spills just about every time they hit the ball (which is definitely not what real volleyball is like), the shows operate on pretty similar levels of logic and realism. Each match involves some reasonable-sounding level of strategy in both physical and psychological approach to matches, with circumstances evolving as the matches play out and strategies changing. Attack no. 1 is keyed in on the fact that its characters shouldn’t be able to perform above a middle school level, except for dramatically when the girl they’re scared of going up against in the finals can do what’s described as a “university-level technique” in the form of this twisting dive receive. This technique is then used way more times than should ever be necessary in a real match, to an extent where I think the animation director was just enjoying himself playing that animation over and over. By the way, we’re introduced to this technique when the girl uses it to save a kid from a car, gets hit by it, and lands on her feet, seemingly uninjured. So yeah, the show can get really ridiculous out of nowhere every now and again.

I have to imagine that manga author Urano Chikaku-sensei did plenty of research and talked to girls who’d played volleyball in school, just because of how many details feel so obviously true to life, especially in the characterization of the teammates and their conflicts. I sense that Urano-sensei is more interested in telling character stories than she is in compelling sports matches, which is fair enough for a fictional sports story wherein the sportsmanship can’t possibly be the impressive part; but Ayuhara winning match point by figuring out that she could hit the ball from precisely a place where the sun would be in the receiver’s eyes, causing her to miss the ball, is better for dramatic storytelling than it is for grounding the volleyball match in a sense of realism. 

Beyond the match itself, the main plot point of this arc is the coach refusing to let his team watch any of their opponents matches leading up to the final, even though they all keep begging him to. Instead, he makes them sit in an auditorium and listen to Beethoven’s 5th while thinking about strategies. During the match, when the opponent starts getting into Kozue’s head, the coach pulls the team aside to close their eyes and think about the sounds of classical music so that they can focus on playing their own volleyball at their own pace without letting their conception of their opponents cloud their judgement. There’s also some dialog about how the girls have practiced enough at this point that they need to trust their instincts over thinking and strategy and believe in their abilities. All of that was the best stuff in this mostly just okay arc.

Thankfully the next one is easily the most interesting yet, focusing in on challenging Ayuhara Kozue’s ego and self-absorbedness in the wake of her team’s national victory. It’s actually pretty rare in sports anime for a team to become the best in Japan so relatively early into the story, with the nationals very often serving as the climactic event of team sports narratives. Granted, that’s usually at the tail end of a high school career and not the second year of a middle school one; and there have been shows about middle-school champions continuing their careers into high school such as Kuroko no Basket, but that show completely indulged in the clashing maniacal egos of its high-level players, whereas Attack No. 1 is out to criticize Kozue for failing to responsibly approach the affirmative consequences of her sudden fame.

When the volleyball team comes back from Tokyo, they are showered in adulation from everyone at the school, and the Attack Duo become instant local celebrities. The principal is so impressed that he wants to reorganize the sports budget to build an entire second gym just for the girls to practice in, so that they won’t have to worry about hogging the gym from other clubs. This decision raises eyebrows with the newspaper club, including Kozue’s still prospective boyfriend Inukami, and another girl that Kozue sees as a threat for his affections, who think that the club is overstating its own worth based on their victory, and is over-eager to take advantage of the benefits. All Kozue hears, though, is that she “only cares about winning,” which upsets her as a sportsman, for whom victory is a core part of her drive and purpose. She refuses to listen to the criticism of people who haven’t performed in sports themselves, and is bolstered in this thinking when the second most-popular boy in school after Inukami, an explosively violent soccer captain with his own eyes set on the Ayuhara bowl, starts backing her up.

Naturally, Hongou-sensei is ahead of everyone in recognizing the need to humble his team, and devises a match between them, and the team currently considered the best in the world, belonging to a school from the Soviet Union, “land of volleyball,” which just happened to have been spectating the national championship. Before the match, he challenges his team to clarify why they play volleyball--and when he can’t get a satisfying answer, he threatens resignation as coach, and refuses to coach their practice leading up to or their match with the Soviet team. As usual, the girls mostly take this as him being an asshole.

Ayuhara isn’t necessarily wrong to be proud of herself or to take advantage of opportunities to improve her team, but her unwillingness to even consider the idea that there might be consequences or reasons to reconsider some of her self-congratulatory attitude receives criticism from all sides until Kozue can’t take it anymore. Unable to understand what she’s doing wrong, she is haunted by the thought that she needs those people whose opinions she trusts, such as Inukami and Hongou-sensei, to be on her side. As such, she doubles down on the idea that she can prove her team’s deservement of the new gym by staking whether or not it gets built on whether her team can beat the Soviets. The principal, terrified, begs Hongou-sensei to coach the team in representing Japan for a victory against the foreign nation--but Hongou-sensei straight-up tells him he is willing to let the girls lose if that’s what it takes for them Kozue to learn her lesson.

Despite Kozue opening with a strong start, the unshaken confidence of the Soviet team gets her started on a paranoid downward spiral all the way to the ground. Her team loses and, unable to take the shame of having staked it all and lost, Ayuhara Kozue vows to quit volleyball for good. However, the captain of the Soviet team, Stellanina, is not okay with this. She confronts Kozue multiple times to say how she knows there must’ve been something distracting her during the match, because she hadn’t played nearly to the level that she did during the championship. Once Kozue can finally admit this to her, she is forbidden from quitting volleyball by Stellanina, who says that she will never forgive Kozue for giving her such a poor match unless she comes and takes her on again at full power.

With that interaction, Kozue finally realizes that she cannot view victory as the compelling force behind her playing volleyball, because victory is fleeting, and loss, should you continue choosing to play, is inevitable. To run away from the sport after failure would mean that the sport itself never mattered above being victorious at something--and no one will ever reach the top of a sport without a sincere love of doing the thing, because it takes giving the whole of your life to the thing to get there.

Earlier in the arc, before the conversation about building another gym had begun, the gymnastics teacher had told her team that anyone not serious enough about the sport to practice it outside didn’t deserve to practice it inside. At the meeting to determine whether or not the volleyball gym should actually be built, Kozue finally expresses that it isn’t necessary, because her team would even practice outside if it was all they had to continue bolstering their strength at the sport. This attitude shift inspires Inukami to finally vote in favor of the gym being built, and to convince the rest of the student council of the same. With that, he even earns the respect of his romantic rival, and the volleyball team gains both a respect for failure, and a new rival to keep in their sights for the future.

Unfortunately the next arc is sort of frustrating and repetitive, if only because it once again dives into Kozue’s character flaws in a way that puts her at odds with the rest of the club and threatening to leave it, and this time her over-dramatic nature is clearly to blame--which I still think is an interesting part of her character, but it’s the kind of arc where I find myself wanting to shout at her through my television along with the entire rest of the cast. That almost sounds like a good thing, except that the show usually follows Kozue and her train of thought when she’s on her own, so you start feeling just as much as the rest of the group that maybe she could go leave you alone so you can practice with the other girls for a while. You don’t get that option though, because you’re strapped onto the Kozue-coaster as a viewer, and the ride is going nowhere for like the next four episodes.

To summarize the central plot points of this arc, the girl with the crazy receive that took them everything to conquer at the nationals is re-training her team to be attack-focused, and sending ominous letters of rivalry to the Fujimi volleyball club. Kozue once again becomes obsessed with over-training, pushes the girls too far again and again until the point where all of them hate her, and one of them is hospitalized, and then is asked to step down as team captain for now by Hongou-sensei. 

Kozue is so deeply offended by getting attitude from everyone that she basically fucks off and starts having a borderline manic episode over it. That’s when the gymnastics coach swoops in, recruits her to the gymnastics club, and starts giving her just as brutal a training as she ever got from Hongou-sensei. In a promise that the gymnastics coach claims to have made to Hongou-sensei, she needs Kozue to master this difficult flip technique within just a few days--but as they get down to the wire, Kozue just can’t pull it off. That’s when the gymnastics teacher tells Kozue to pick up a volleyball, filling the girl with such untold joy that she immediately vows her loyalty to the sport once again; and then reveals that all of this was a set-up by the two coaches to get Kozue to learn gymnastics so that she could be ready to pull off the secret technique--Rolling Receive. 

Now look, I know Hongou-sensei’s whole thing is that he’ll only work if you don’t question his coaching techniques, but I really have to wonder how necessary this was. Seems like he could’ve just told Kozue that she had to learn gymnastics so that she could use a technique that would make her a strong enough receiver to compensate for the opponent’s fixation on attack, and she would’ve agreed to do it. As evidenced by the fact that Kozue doesn’t make it back to the team until literally one point before the opponent’s victory in the second game of the national finals, Kozue is only even necessary to the team at all in giving them just enough edge to push past the second-best team in the nation after themselves--and as cool as it is that this arc proves that point, I would have so much rather that the point of it been getting to sideline Kozue for a while for the chance to flesh out all of the other girls on the team. 

What becomes clear as the girls near the end of middle school, is that a lot of these characters are not going to be relevant to the series much longer. Ultimately, Kozue and Midori are going to move past the rest of the team, competing internationally and having lengthy careers in the sport. This, however, was NOT a good reason to focus on Kozue more exclusively than ever in this last competitive arc of middle school--especially giving such an unflattering light to a character who, until then, was wholeheartedly dedicated to making her team the best she could. It would’ve been a great time to instead showcase Midori’s development through seeing her interact with the other girls, and maybe give a couple of them some memorable moments so that we can think of them as more than just “the one with the side-tie ponytail” or “the one with the freckles and overbite,” etc. Alas, instead we have an arc with lots of over-the-top melodrama leading into a climax that feels much more limply hyped than the endings of any previous arcs. 

Thankfully, the one after that a lot more entertaining. With graduation approaching and most of the volleyball club either going to different schools or just doing other things than volleyball, it’s time for our heroes, Kozue and Midori, to move up into a bigger field of play. One of Hongou-sensei’s old friends, a brutal volleyball dictator with a bum arm named Inokuma, decides to put together a team of all the best girls’ volleyball players in the country and build a team to take to America for a worldwide competition--and Kozue and Midori have made the team, along with the captain of the second-best team, and a bunch of new characters.

If you thought Hongou-sensei’s teaching methods were intense, he’s got nothing on the cold and brutal Inokuma, whom the press, the volleyball association, and even Hongou himself continue questioning, wondering if he will break the girls like he did his own college team back when he was a player. Some girls are kicked or leave along the way, but with the core team of ultra-hardcore players sticking around, Inokuma reasons that as long as the girls are willing to give their souls to his training, then he will keep training them as he sees fit.

One of the new girls we meet, named Sanjou, is just as much of a hardass as any of the other three we’ve come up with, but for very different reasons. Apparently, her brother went off to play volleyball and then vanished off the face of the Earth, filling her with such a burning hatred for the sport that she’s dedicated her life to trying to ruin it for other people by being so much better and more dedicated that you’d have to work yourself to death keeping up with her. This powered-by-spite motivation, while over-the-top, is incredibly fun to watch, especially when Sanjou is so frustrated that she has to go deadlift about it.

When Sanjou sees Kozue coming out of Inokuma’s room late one night, she becomes determined that the two of them are having sex and makes a bunch of stink about it; but no one really bites, and mostly everyone else just wonders what the hell her deal is. Turns out, unsurprisingly as the foreshadowing is not subtle, that Inokuma is actually Sanjou’s long-lost brother having changed his identity; and finding this out pretty much seems to fix her relationship with volleyball and possibly also humanity instantly. To close out the arc and show just how much the crazy-ass chains-on-wrists training has risen the team’s skill level, they take on a boys’ high school team in a practice match and beat them handily. With that, our superstar squad is ready to fly.

Honestly, as entertaining as it is to watch these girls absolutely pouring their mind, body and soul into volleyball training, it does get a bit repetitive having yet another hardass coach pelting girls with balls until they quit; and this arc probably could’ve been two episodes shorter if you just cut redundant scenes of people reacting to how harshly Inokuma pushes the girls. Thankfully, it all pays off in the next arc when the All-Japan team flies to New York City to face off against teams from around the globe in a trans-national tournament.

Right off the plane, when the girls see what they’re up against not only from their established rivals on the Soviet team, but also from the Kenyan, American, Czechoslovakian, and Korean teams, they are shaken so much that they keep making mistakes in practice. Before they can go do the usual nails-hard training, though, the captain of the American team turns up in a car and invites the whole team to a party at her house with all of the other teams invited. Inokami leaves it in Kozue’s hands to decide if the team gets to go, so they do, and I have to say, the conception of an American upper-class party seemed incredibly spot-on. 

The main theme of this arc, as established here, is how volleyball can bring people of wildly different class and culture together because of their automatic shared understanding of what all of them are there to do, even if their motivations may differ. The American team has an attitude mostly of just having fun and enjoying volleyball, and takes it pretty well when the Japanese team mops the floor with them in the first game. It’s the Soviet Union’s first game which really grabs everyone’s attention, though, as they go up against the powerful but short-handed Kenyan team, who we are told could not afford to bring substitute players, as their country doesn’t have the money. 

Just when it seems like the Kenyan captain Manuba’s powerful returns and raw volleyball spirit might compel her team to success, one of the Soviet players delivers their signature Killer Spike, which hits Manuba’s arms so hard it very clearly breaks her in some way. However, before the medics can rush in, Manuba shouts them away, begging to be allowed to continue playing and hollering in her native tongue for ‘my Kenya.” As the crowd joins in her chant, she fights her way to her feet, just to get beaten down again harder and harder by the Soviet Spike until there aren’t any more points to score. It’s easily one of the most memorable scenes in the show, and one that inspires all of the characters to witness it, with Inokuma stating that “seeing her fight means more than 100 of (his) lectures.”

Later, on the way across town, Kozue’s volleyball gets snatched by a kid who leads her straight into the hood. Just when it seems like she’s going to get the Harlem shakedown, one of the girls from the American team shows up and helps her out, deducing the identity of the ball-snatcher and guiding Kozue to his bungalow, in which his bedridden grandmother lies. As it turns out, this kid wants to play soccer and is too poor to afford a ball, so he’d just taken what he could get. 

Kozue tries to offer the ball to the kid, but ends up in an argument with the girl from the American team about being motivated by money to play volleyball. Kozue claims that she plays primarily for the glory, which the American girl finds worthless as it won’t put food on the table. My thought was that it is indeed the glory which one is paid to have, and so you can’t just have the money without the glory, but ultimately Kozue becomes determined to prove that there is more to volleyball than just money somehow with her play.

As the Soviet team knocks the Czech team from the tournament, Japan has a difficult, but confident, and ultimately victorious match against Korea. Kozue gives the game-winning ball to the kid from before, and Inokuma is not satisfied with the girls’ performance, believing that they didn’t play at a level that is ready to deal with the Soviet team and their Killer Spike. Kozue tasks herself to figure out a new technique to deal with the spike, and is inspired when she sees the kid with the volley-soccerball cancelling its momentum with his head. As such, the best spiker from the Korean team volunteers to help the Japanese team practice a two-part receive that sends the ball over a first girl’s head before a second one returns it.

The final battle between Japan and the Soviet Union is intense and awesome, with all the tactics and techniques we’ve seen both teams building up over the series colliding, and the camera pulling in on limbs and faces with hyper-tight focus between hurried, dramatic cuts. It feels just different enough from all the other matches in the show that you can really feel how much everyone on each team is pushing themselves; and in the end, in spite of a truly proud performance and success with their secret techniques, the Japanese team still isn’t able to overcome the Soviets. Yet, as members of all of the teams meet to shake hands and share in mutual respect as sportsmen, Stellanina immediately challenges Kozue to meet her next at the Olympics, putting that ominous word into everyone’s minds as they dream of throwing their souls onto the court together once more in the future.

With the international competition behind us, it’s finally time for Kozue and crew to move on to high school--but before the school year begins, Kozue starts getting propositioned for contracts from a plethora of different companies to come work for their volleyball teams. When she discovers that her almost-boyfriend Inukami is going to have to drop out of high school to support his father’s ailing business, Kozue almost signs off on a full-time employment with the company that has the most money; but Inukami swoops in to slap the living shit out of her and demand she not. Even members of the company volleyball team are shocked that this dude just showed up and hit a girl, but Kozue doesn’t seem to care. More on this in a bit.

Kozue, Midori, and the most recognizable of the original team members, who finally starts getting called by her name regularly, Naka, finally make it to high school and join the volleyball club, only to find they’ve fallen into a fresh hell. Team captain Oonuma and her gaggle of upperclassman have a habit of hazing the hell out of the first-years, and are all too excited to start putting Kozue and Midori through the ringer in the name of what they call “club tradition.” At first the girls are ready to bear under any punishment in the name of getting to play volleyball, but once they find the treatment has crossed the line, they work up the nerve to stand up to the high school girls, at one point finally erupting into the all-out brawl we’ve just been waiting for them to get themselves into all along.

This leads the upperclassmen to challenge the younger girls to compete in a match against another school, and promise to resign if they can’t win. Of course when the match is underway, the best players in Japan are doing fine, so one of the older girls sabotages Kozue by putting lime juice in her towel, blinding and irritating her to the point of unconsciousness. As the volleyball club dissolves, its reputation going down the drain, people on the sidelines blame the passive coaching of the club’s sponsor, and the principal calls for the deformation of the club. Faced with her own astronomical failure, the teacher finally decides to start taking responsibility and finds evidence of the tampering to Kozue’s towel, and the younger students are reintegrated. After getting called out by basically everyone, Oonuma finally turns tail and resigns from the club.

With Kozue now back as the focal point of the team’s dynamics, all of the younger girls are inclined to think of her as the de-facto captain, and the other older members, no longer having Oonuma’s coattails to cling to, lose interest in the club and hand in resignations. Kozue is not okay with this, still wanting the more experienced and powerful players on her team, and so in returning to her mentality from the first couple of arcs, she chases Oonuma down and asks her to come back to the team as its captain, so that she can lead the younger girls with her charisma. With her participating in the three-part spike return with Midori and Kozue, the team is now strong enough to handle the enemy school captain’s spike, and return the ball with enough velocity to stump her ironclad receiving arms.

The enemy team, which trains by having a machine fire 80mph spikes at them, is not satisfied with the loss, and goes straight into hardcore training their own return skills for the rematch. Meanwhile, another school’s team introduces itself to our heroes by way of its trio of sister members, who challenge the top three of Fujimi high to a three-on-three exhibition match. Kozue and crew are eager to face down this challenge, until their opponent does this shit.

There’s like this alarm noise that plays the whole time they’re building up to using this move, and it’s one of the most, uh, alarming ways I’ve ever seen a sports move presented in a show. Anyways, the sisters are so terrifying that the Fujimi team is completely demoralized, believing it literally impossible for them to train hard enough to beat this team--especially under the less-intense coaching of their female teacher. I wanna talk about this a bit.

As much as I consider the appeal of Attack no. 1 to be the strong-willed protagonists pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into being the best at their sport, it is also a show whose expository opening song takes a moment aside for the singer to state that “sometimes I cry though… after all, I’m just a girl.” I think it’s a cute lyric and I like when shows about strong female characters make a point to show their weaknesses as well--but there’s definitely an undercurrent in the show of the sentiment that women are just not as emotionally tough or rational as men. 

It’s fine that the teacher, a woman, is less tough than the previous coaches that the girls have had, but I don’t like how even characters like Kozue, themselves incredible hard-asses, would claim that a woman just can’t be as tough on her team as a man could. Hell, we saw the gymnastics teacher coaching her just fine a few arcs ago, so I don’t even believe her when she says she wants a tough male coach--I think she just likes men hitting her with big balls.

I say that because the drama in this arc is the realization that Hongou-sensei may have signed to coach for a competing school. All the girls are really down about it and threatening a total loss of interest in volleyball if they have to continue with their current coach--but then, a familiar voice calls out, and Kozue and Midori are pelted with volleyballs as hopeful music begins to swell and everyone calls out to Hongou-sensei as he walks in, just pelting girls with balls.

Recognizing that this is a Japanese cartoon from 1970 based on a manga written by a woman, I think there are plenty of things that it feels progressive in comparison to from its era; but it’s also a show where someone gets bitchslapped nearly every episode, adult men slap teen girls to bring them to their senses, and the girls themselves can only get excited about playing volleyball if they’re having their hands chained together while someone shouts criticism and pelts them in the face with balls. It all comes off a bit fetishistic to me, which isn’t necessarily a complaint because I think one of the points of media is to explore the universe of peoples’ minds, but it’s something I think deserves to be mentioned, and that the show was better when it felt more subtle.

The rest of te training arc that ensues is repetitive and not very exciting, so to summarize quickly, Hongou-sensei makes Kozue run laps over and over, everyone doubts his methods because they haven’t learned, but eventually devises that he’s teaching her the Double Attack technique for use against their two new rival schools in the coming tournament. 

Honestly, I found it difficult to get invested in the story of this tournament on the whole, as it ended up feeling like a weaker retread of what we’d experienced in the earlier arcs, although at least a bit more sports-focused. If nothing else, though, the dramatic sub-plot of this arc goes in some pretty wild directions. Kozue’s almost-boyfriend Inukami has had to hospitalize his father and take his business to the streets, selling produce straight from the back of a truck at reduced prices. Kozue helps him with his business and is concerned with his affairs to the point it actually starts distracting her from volleyball. I’ll take this opportunity to say that aside from all the bitch-slapping, I think Kozue and Inukami make a pretty cute and realistic couple for most of Attack no. 1. They’re always supporting one-another in meaningful ways, with Inukami finding opportunities and analyzing the mistakes of Kozue, and Kozue throwing herself behind him in any way she can.

Just when it seems like this long-teased power couple is on its way to success, and just as Kozue is winning her match, Inukami manages to drive his goddamn truck off a cliff and into a lake. He’s rushed to the hospital, and one of the little girls who’d been supporting his business runs into the middle of the game to tell Kozue that he is in fatal condition. Deciding that there’s no possible way Inukami could die, Kozue plays out the rest of the match to desperate victory, only to find out that Inukami is already dead by the time she gets to the hospital. Both Inukami’s father and the little girl berate her for not being there when he kept calling out her name to his dying breath. Kozue rushes off and tries to walk out into the ocean to find her way back to her lost love, before the rest of the team finds her and brings her home.

For a while, Kozue is understandably shaken, briefly questioning her involvement in volleyball once more, and then continuing to fight on with the memories of Inukami at once guiding and haunting her thoughts. Meanwhile, as the team continues practicing and perfecting their Double Attack, Oonuma has the idea from watching a tennis match to put double the spin on the ball, potentially making it too difficult for the terrifying trio of sisters to deflect. There is plenty of training and drama during and between matches, as we learn that the trio’s coach is their own dying mother, who wants them to go out and fight no matter what condition she might be in. 

Unsurprisingly, the trio’s team goes up against Fujimi High at the tournament final, in a stunning match with much more in the way of wild visual effects than the previous finals. It’s worth mentioning that ever since the girls made it to high school and their reused animations were redone, the designs have looked more crisp, and there is greater detail and variety in the types of volleyball moves on display. Even if the dramatic context of the matches hasn’t been as strong as before throughout this arc, the portrayal of volleyball has at least gotten more fun.

Fujimi high ultimately loses to the team with the sister trio, but that’s okay because it’s Inukami’s turn to put together a national team for an exhibition match against the Koraen team with all of the top high schoolers, and the sisters are there, along with Kozue, Midori, and Oonuma from Fujimi, the other girls from the previous national team, and some new faces from the other high schools we’ve heard about. This time, the drama that springs up is from having a totally ununified team, with girls from certain high schools refusing to give their all to practice or to the match because they don’t want anyone seeing their techniques before the next tournament.

Ultimately, what moderately resolves this conflict is the team being humbled by the match itself. With the sister trio’s mother dying the morning of, they have to abstain--which is something Kozue refuses to do in spite of having injured her wrist in the previous match, and the sisters implore her to chase victory. Kozue somehow convinces the school doctor to give her numbing injections so that she can play through the pain in her arm, and earns the title “volleyball idiot” from everyone around her. The match against Korea is brutal and brings the best out of the teammates, forcing their cooperation, even as Kozue continually confounds the crowds by insisting on bashing her broken wrist against the ball. It works out in the end, in the sense that Kozue makes a gave-saving return with both hands before being carried out on a stretcher, but pretty much everyone’s reaction is exactly the same: literally wtf is wrong with you, Kozue? Good thing the doc says her fighting spirit is worth more than any medicine! We’ve seen it heal her body before!

The next short arc introduces a salty hater who disses the volleyball club for their low grades out of jealousy towards their accomplishments because her mom made her quit playing tennis to focus on her studies. While Kozue struggles to compete with her academically, she is impressed with the girl’s physical acumen and mind-games her into spite-joining the volleyball club. Right away, Kozue starts putting her through the kind of training that she’s used to going through herself, to the point that it gets reported on by the school newspaper, becomes gossip that pisses off the rest of the volleyball club, and leads to everyone decrying the abuse besides Minamura herself, who just views it as gathering further ammunition. 

However, after Kozue is finally run off, Minamura is accosted for failing to recognize that Kozue was just taking her seriously as a team member and trying to have her ready to be a mainstay member of the team. This conception of events moves Minamura to finally embrace Kozue and the volleyball club in sincerity, and to decides to stick it to her mom. Kozue is able to convince her mother to let her daughter play in a match to show her skills, and that’s exactly what happens. Her mom isn’t exactly happy about it, but Minamura joins the team anyways. 

The next arc starts with Kozue getting kidnapped off the streets and hallucinating this while passed out on chloroform in the back of a van… I’m so glad this is in episode 69. These criminals take Kozue’s EMG data and then dump her in the streets, then try to run her down with a van before other girls show up and they drive off. This sparks an investigation from some journalists, while Kozue is coming under fire back at school for continuing to play in spite of her arm injury, and Hongou-sensei actually calls for her suspension from the team. 

Everyone else is immediately terrified that they won’t be shit without Kozue, but they see Minamura busting her ass training and decide to put some faith in her. It’s a hard-fought match between Fujimi high and the team that Sanjou now plays for, but thanks to the devisement of Minamura setting for Midori and forming a new combo, they prevail. The criminals who kidnapped Kozue are then seen leaving the auditorium, causing her to give chase and discover along with the reporter the identity of the school that’s been going to such lengths to gather player data for their computer training. Kozue psychotically asks the reporter not to talk about this story until she can beat that team in volleyball first to prove to them that their training techniques will never work. 

This becomes hilariously framed as a humans vs. robots game by the girls, except that the chink in the robot girls’ armor is, in fact, being human. Hongou-sensei tells them to use chaos tactics, and that’s how they win the match. These small arcs comprising this tournament are decent enough, and probably closest to the way that arcs in sports anime have become traditionally laid out, with four or five episodes introducing a rival school with a specific gimmick, the girls devising new moves and strategies to deal with them, and all of that being executed with twists and turns thrown in on the court; nothing exceptional, but watchable matches.

After this, the girls go off to summer training camp for a largely frivolous arc about getting challenged by a biker gang. It mostly felt like an excuse for all this really nice background art of rural Japan, which I appreciate, but most of this story was forgettable. Kozue almost dies, the biker girl saves her, and then she’s out of the show.

The next stretch focuses on a rival team with a skill called the Mammoth Spike, which once again starts tearing its way through the arms of the Fujimi girls. This rivalry is mostly pretty boring, but has some outside drama in that Kozue unwittingly falls in love with the other team’s coach, but has to deal with him being cold toward her so that he can support his team through the tournament. Fujimi wins in the end of course, and Inokuma immediately shows up to pluck Kozue out of all this high school nonsense to get back on the national team.

Unfortunately, to me this moment marks the death knell of Attack no. 1. I have no idea if the series was being cancelled, or if the author was out of ideas or what, but this last thirteen-episode section of the series pretty much abandons every single character that isn’t Kozue in the name of quickly giving her one last match against Stellanina before the show is over. If you were hoping to hear about Kozue and friends kicking ass at the Olympic games, get ready for disappointment, because Kozue is the only returning character who makes it onto Inokuma’s new international team. Now granted this is because she’s the only high school player on their team, but the other international teams all have Kozue’s peers on them still, so it’s not like she’s in a whole different playing field. 

Cutting every single mentionable member of Kozue’s team from the show, and then barely doing anything to establish her bland adult team before she shows all of them up in the final battle seems like such a baffling decision that I have to try and pull some logic out of it from a creator’s perspective. Halfway into Attack no. 1, the established next major goal was the Olympic games--but it was never clear just how long remained before the next Olympic games could be played in. Personally, I was shocked when the next arc wasn’t just immediate training for the Olympics; but as a matter of fact there is never any real mention of or buildup to them again until the final arc, which isn’t even the Olympics, but a much less hyped, much less interesting or character-focused version of the international tournament from before. But that’s okay, because the author gave herself an out to end the series on back when Kozue’s boyfriend died--in his journals given to her after his death, Kozue learned it was his wish for her to become ATTACK NO. 1--the number one attacker in the world--and this then became Kozue’s overall goal for the series.

You would think this would be a title she gained by winning gold in the Olympics, but that would’ve meant the construction of a huge, satisfying arc in which all of our favorite faces return and have new things to do, and the establishment of a huge bracket with everyone developing new super moves all the time and stuff, and that could’ve easily meant volumes worth of content if the manga had been meant to continue long-term. In this worldwide competition, though, by simply establishing that the teams are not limited to high-school players, and then having Kozue become her team’s VIP player through her specialization in attack, Kozue is able to become Attack no. 1, and the show can still end on Kozue dreaming of her future try at the Olympics, while only giving minimal facetime to returning characters from around the world and stuffing all the dramatic tension into the final battle between Shellenina and Kozue. It’s by far their least exciting match yet, and the series goes out on a note that says this thing just needed to be put to rest in the least ruinous way that it could.

One might even say that it would’ve been more satisfying had the series ended either after the first match with the Soviet Union, or at most after the boyfriend died, and luckily you can pretend that it did by ignoring the TV show completely and watching the film compilations instead. Four movies were created out of compiled footage from the TV show, with the first two covering the first two arcs of the show, the third one just covering the whole international tournament, and the fourth covering the arc in which her boyfriend dies. I wouldn’t necessarily say that this covers every single cool or worthwhile part of the show, but it’s easily all of the most noteworthy stuff, and considering that the show probably would’ve been better off with like 39 to 52 episodes in my opinion, I’d have a hard time encouraging anyone to watch the TV show in its entirety.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t glad to have watched it all myself, because I do like the show quite a bit in spite of its many aspects I recognize as flawed. While I think there were many scenes with excellent dramatic framing and coloring to highlight a moment, or realistic-looking and impactful volleyball animations, or great-looking painted backgrounds and dynamically posed character portraits, there are also mountains of jank--sometimes whole scenes or half-episodes of jank--and a lot of it is laugh-out-loud worthy. I found myself laughing many times at Kozue’s incredibly slight expressions, because even though I think it built her character wonderfully to always look more glamorous than emotional by comparison to everyone else in the show, it was also preposterous and hilarious in presentation much of the time.

I had to play a lot of clips in this video so you can appreciate how much legwork the voice acting, music and sound effects do in making this story dramatically viable. If it didn’t have the guy who was later going to do the Gundam soundtrack scoring it, or all these voice actresses giving savagely intense performances, the goofy imagery of this show would be a lot easier to laugh at much of the time. I can’t imagine trying to watch this show with a low-grade English dub, but I don’t have to worry about that because this show never got released in English-speaking countries, and has barely caught on at all within English-speaking territories.

Like many popular sports anime, Attack no. 1 did much better in other regions, with some European releases over the decades including an extremely successful run in the 90s in Germany under the name Mila Superstar--shoutout to my German viewers who almost certainly had the biggest chance of finding this video because of that! The show’s legacy hasn’t loomed nearly as prominently over time as many other popular 60s manga, though, with the author briefly attempting a reboot a few years later which didn’t have legs, and then silence until an eleven-episode live-action TV adaptation in 2005. I tried watching a bit of this, but it seemed exceptionally cheesy and unfun with terrible music, so I gave up quickly.

If I had to put my finger on Attack no. 1’s lack of longevity as an intellectual property, it’s simply a lack of iconic imagery. Kozue’s character design is barely enough to distinguish her as the main character in context of the series, and certainly isn’t something easily translatable into adaptations. Most of this show’s influence can be felt in the way the story is told, and its biggest strengths are in the archetypes it chooses to focus on, which can very easily be recontextualized into other stories. I think too many of the details of the story only click in consideration of the time and place it was released, and if you changed any of it in an effort to modernize it, then it wouldn’t be recognizable anymore on a fundamental level. It’s a product of its era in every way, and as influential as it might have been for its time, I can’t say I’m astonished that its creator isn’t known for anything else. Lots of other sports anime, like the iconic Tiger Mask which aired alongside it, have survived a lot longer on the strength of their timeless visual iconography,

Nevertheless, I don’t think Attack no. 1 is a series worth forgetting. Even if it doesn’t hold up that well in 2021, especially in the second half, and a lot of its ideas have been improved upon by other shows over the decades, it really does have a unique atmosphere and cadence all its own that let it reach me over many of the other sports shows I’ve tried to watch. I was never able to enjoy the lengthy and hyper-dramatic matches in Haikyuu, for instance, because as much as I love the animation and think it conjures decent sports narrative, the focus on exaltation as an emotional state of sports just never resonated with me. I want my sports to be a brutal, hard-fought battle with pride and maybe even lives on the line. The best anime I’ve seen that presents this hard-nosed and exhilarating side of sports is Ping Pong, which I can much more easily recommend than Attack no. 1 at just 11 fantastic episodes; but that show won’t give you endless sequences of high school girls seconds away from kicking the shit out of each other, taking spill after spill on the volleyball court as they grit their teeth, pound the court, and get up for another round. The spirit of the show, if nothing else, is something I have no contest with.

Attack no. 1 is at times completely ridiculous, at others completely engrossing, and at others, borders on offensive. I know I’ll remember Kozue’s personality and her relationship with Midori and the various coaches she worked with long into the future; and when I’m not in the trenches of trying to binge all the bad episodes, the best moments will be left to linger in my heart, which is why I want to give Attack no. 1 the credit it deserves as a classic anime. I’ll even recall some funny things I didn’t want to have to explain, like the episode that’s a PSA about atrocities committed to the people of Okinawa, or the arc where Kozue keeps hallucinating balloons.

Whether you love the series already for nostalgic reasons, are interested in giving it a shot now because of this video, or don’t think you’ll ever watch it in spite of listening to me talk about it for so long, I hope you’ll at least remember it as a token of a time when anime was new enough that even a kind of awkward and lop-sided cartoon about girls’ volleyball could have the cultural impact to effect the landscape of anime to come, and even inspire the careers of real-life sportsmen.

If you liked hearing about this series, then I implore you to subscribe to the Ygg Studio channel and ring the bell so you’ll be notified when the second letter of the Anime Alphabet drops. In that video, I’ll be talking about Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, so be sure and get ahead of me in watching it if you don’t want spoilers! You can support this show by donating to my substack blog, where I release exclusive articles and podcasts to subscribers; or you can get those podcasts on my patreon. Follow me on instagram and twitter @goldenwitchfire to scope my fly fits, or all the fantastic art I like to retweet, and my tiktok account for fun videos, and rest stop reviews on my @reststopreviews account. Thanks again for watching and don’t forget: anime forever!