100 Meters: anime sports drama never quite finds its footing
Iwaisawa Kenji’s animation attempts to capture the thrill of competitive running, but its underdeveloped characters leave the action feeling stilted and predictable.
From the famous Akira (1988) motorbike slide to Haku’s rippling dragon form in Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away (2001), Japanese animators have long used sequences of static images to portray superhuman velocity. Iwaisawa Kenji’s second feature, 100 Meters – following his cult school band hit On-Gaku: Our Sound (2019) – attempts to apply this principle to the condensed exhilaration of track and field.
It’s a typical rise-to-the-top shōnen rivalry, presented over the course of multiple timeskips. Togashi (voiced Matsuzaka Tori post-prologue) is best in his class at school at running the 100 metre sprint, until transfer student Komiya (later Sometani Shota) enters the picture. Togashi is seeking success. Komiya is seeking escape. Both have a strong desire to run – and that’s about all we get. Adapted from the manga of the same name by Uoto, 100 Meters is steadfastly focused on its namesake to a fault. If there were a Bechdel test for two characters discussing something other than track and field, Iwaisawa’s film would fail it. As such, we never get a handle on who these characters are as people. We’re fed with interminable exposition, but it’s all factual scene-setting and the results are emotionally skeletal.
The animation by Rock ‘N’ Roll Mountain studio tries to humanise these characters, but it’s strange that an anime feature concerned with our bodies in motion would render them so stilted and static. The film is for the most part rotoscoped, a stylistic choice that only hits its stride after the film’s first timeskip. The rotoscoping is most evident in the many duologue scenes, when runners shuffe awkwardly to face each other across tracks and down hallways. The character designs are neither abstracted nor photoreal enough for this effect to feel meaningful, leaving under-expressive shōnen manga faces uneasily affixed to lumbering full-scale adult forms.
When we do hit the track, Iwaisawa’s approach to the action is dull and predictable, cross-cutting between windswept close-ups of pained faces and a uniform cluster of arms flailing at right angles. There are glimmers of a more exciting film – a couple of winningly inventive match cuts that would make even Park Chan-wook envious – but these are few and far between. Hiroaki Tsutsumi’s score is the real standout: a hair-raising, blood-pumping blast of brass and synth, but its strength only ends up accentuating the hollowness of the sights it accompanies. There are brief bursts of life here, but little is remembered once the pair cross the finish line.
► 100 Meters is in UK cinemas now.