Ani-Me #30: Finding Flight with PING-PONG: THE ANIMATION (Patreon)

Why the hell do we do anything?

I know that’s a ridiculously broad question, but it’s precisely why we should ask it. Even answering it logically seems silly. You say to yourself, “well, we need food, clothes, shelter, etc. and to do that we need money, so we need a job, yada yada yada.” But even when it comes to how we spend our spare time, we have to admit that so many of the grand ideas we’re supposed to embrace, ones like love, hobbies, or purposeful deeds, but they just seem to get dominated by the moment-to-moment whims of brains. Often we’re looking for a distraction, or staving off boredom, or trying to find solace in joking with a friend. And even when truly alone with our thoughts? It’s as if we invent our own interiority from the void, desperate for the grace of imagination and grasping at the most timid of human hopes. In this dire kind of world, it’s just so damn easy to slip into autopilot mode, embrace our routines, and feed the constant desire to hide from the horrors of life. Which is why that pesky question of personal “motivation” is both really annoying and yet at the very heart of each and every single aspect of our lives. Why the hell do we do anything we do? And it’s also the question at the heart of the show I finished watching yesterday…

To catch you up, for this month’s Ani-Me column I held a vote between Haikyu!! and Ping Pong: The Animation and it ended up being a tie. But from the very loose dialogue you offered, I get why choosing was so hard. But in retrospect, I’m very happy I went in this viewing order, for it is one of the few examples where comparison between the two actually tells us a lot about their nature. On one side, Haikyu!! is a perfectly engineered show (which I covered here). It offers crisp animation, dramatic stakes, and grand insight into the sport of Volleyball. Every little detail feels like it’s built to precision. But it’s also able to inject those sporting details with pathos and genuine human emotion. It’s a delightful, inspiring showcase in every way. But when it comes to answering the bigger questions about life and the “why” of it all? Well, IT’S BECAUSE VOLLEYBALL IS AMAZING AND EVERYONE IS PASSIONATE ABOUT IT IN THIS SHOW’S UNIVERSE, OKAY!?!?! BACK OFF!!!! I kid, I kid. The show is actually about a lot of things kids go through, but its singular focus on sports is built to a purpose of making us feel just as passionate about volleyball in turn. In essence, it’s a mythologizing effort, which provides the viewer with an idyllic space where life can seem simpler, cleaner, and kinder. It’s a respite from a weary world. And this has great worth. But for all its sporting similarities, Ping Pong: The Animation is after something much, much different. For it takes the 10,000 foot view on life and the “why” of it all takes center stage… And the end result is something remarkable.

Seriously, Ping Pong: The Animation is contrary in almost every fashion. At first, the animation style is utterly jarring and requires you to keep wading in with time and patience. But by series end? The gaunt, exaggerated style almost feels essential to the series’ entire point. It's the only thing it could ever be. Same goes for the writing structure, which up front feels messy, circuitous, often with characters waltzing around in malaise. Honestly, in that initial batch of episodes I was constantly wondering, “Hey show, where are you going with all this?” You get the sense they are building to something internal, but it’s almost never playing its hand. But please understand they are not doing this in a way that feels withholding, nor teasing, nor do you get the sense it’s trying to surprise you. You just feel them layering depth and building a sense of trust before they hit with a truly compelling moment where characters start letting themselves slip. To wit, I remember I was watching the first episode and was about 20 minutes in and was almost bouncing off it, but then it gets to the moment where Wenge starts letting loose and there’s something so primal about his rage that grabs you, right along with Smile’s sudden avoidance of the match. It would have been easy to try and predict that they’re building the character’s villain-hood or something, but immediately you sense that it’s not that kind of show. You just have this innate feeling like “there’s something shifting here.” And as these moments of slipping came more and more, it evoked a familiar motif used in the show’s imagery. For these compelling moments would start coming like waves upon a beach shore, lapping against the sand, soon carrying us away into the ocean - which would be the character’s lives on screen.

What that sequence also highlights is how disarming Ping Pong is in the way it steers clear of traditional rooting dynamics. To compare to Haikyu!! where we’re always rooting for our happy sweet boys, often while building the reason to hate on the opposing team. Granted, the show also finds all these perfect surgical moments in the story to give everyone some humane dignity. But it’s still all built around traditional feelings of elation around point scores or successes on the court. That’s because it’s ultimately about the audience's yays or nays that come with those wins and losses. But Ping Pong so utterly removes the singular drama in order to dive into the larger swaths of feelings, often painting with broad strokes. Like, it’s not trying to manufacture anything. It rests in the malaise and internal headspaces, confident in its pace. It even questions the very ethical nature of sports and how much it can hurt a person who dives into it without concern. When Smile tells us, “staking your life on table tennis is revolting,” he means it. And maybe so does the show.

So what the hell is all this sports show really about?

Honestly, it wants your dramatic assumptions in order to get where it’s ultimately going. For example, take what could be a typical “classic arc” - that is where characters learn to do the things they couldn’t do at the beginning of the story. For Makoto Tsukimoto AKA Smile AKA robot that would feature him finding his competitiveness, self-worth, and maybe even learning how to enjoy the game and break out of shell. Or consider an arc for Peco where he learns not to be so devil may care and finds his discipline. Or an arc of Wenge being humbled and accepting his loss and moving on. Or even consider Kazama’s tragic path towards self-sabotage and defeat. Now, are all of these things elements of the story that gets told eventually? They certainly are. But it’s so much more complex than a simple A to B storyline. Because Ping Pong is so much less about the drama of these external victories and so much more about the interior grounding of each character. Because so many of them are genuinely wrestling with their own complex instincts. They don’t KNOW who they really are - and thus, so much of their journey is about coming to places of self-understanding.

To wit, I remember the first moment of the show that really hit me was Wenge’s almost-defeat from Smile before Kazama handed him his ass. We had seen all this rage at having to live in Japan, along with all this yearning to return home. But the second all that hope and desire gets side-swiped away in a simple game of ping pong? Then it simply cuts forward to a quiet scene (one of the show’s great storytelling tactics) and now his coach is being kind and talking to him out about “real life” beginning after his ping pong life. It is also here that we come to understand Wenge’s life more than ever before, what with the details of the candy, his mother, and a deep longing for home not out of resentment of where he is now, but what he feels the absence of within. It’s so quietly heartbreaking. And the way he seems to find quiet acceptance of it now makes it feel all the more so. It’s the first moment of true story transcendence in the show. For here, you realize Ping Pong was quietly building this deep want in you in this way you never even realized (to its immense credit the other show that used this dramatic tactic often was a little show called The Sopranos, so… it’s in good company). And even though this moment seems like an “end” for Wenge’s storyline, you’ll soon understand how this is also an emotional trigger for something more that will come with time. The show teaches you to trust it.

So when the last half of the episodes hit their run, the malaise finally starts to budge. But it is not out of mere happenstance. No, the characters are poked, prodded, jostled by life and find that their deeper motivations start snapping into focus. Peco’s long hair existential journey and half-hearted drowning attempt gets to the “why do we do ANYTHING?” faster and more gorgeously than you can believe. And all the while, the person at the center of so much of this story - and thus the person who makes us most curious of all - is Smile. For so much of the running time he feels like Ping Pong’s seeming lead (and I would love any pieces on the character and people relating to his seeming nuerodivergent qualities?) and everyone is trying to motivate his talented ass into wanting to compete at a higher level. He could be a true champion it seems. And yet at every chance he seems to shy away, sometimes even with a flippant retort. Why does he want out of all this, anyway? Why does he play? It all seems like a grand mystery. But the way to his motivation isn’t any of those masculine tropes that supposedly reveal so much about determination, but with gentleness.

It starts coming from Obaba Tamura, the old chain smoking woman who runs the local ping pong center (and who becomes Peco’s mentor), specifically when she speaks to his coach Butterfly Joe about Smile’s seeming lack of development. And she offers a line that’s now practically burned into my brain: “if you wont give him any loving, get out of his life.” It’s such a stark way of disarming everything about sports, coaching, menortship, and so much more. It is the essential understanding that these are kids. Moreover, they are human beings. And thus we see the way she offers that refrain time and time again, no matter what sassy comment she pairs it with, it always comes back to that mantra: “Love ya, Peco.” The words make me teary eyed just thinking about them. For all their training needs to be fueled through that simple affirmation at the core. But even as we understand this anchoring feeling, there’s that nagging question of story logic: where is this all heading?

Fortunately, there’s a key moment where the show suddenly drops a parable from the past that outlines where this current story may be heading in its future. For once upon a time, it seems that Butterfly Joe made the “mistake” where he went easy on his injured friend in the tournament, and then this friend went onto national stage and now runs the rival school. You sense Joe’s misgivings about having done, the pangs of regret mixed with an understanding of why he went easier on him. And with Peco’s own knee injury looming, our own story-brains start firing, for this will also be the fulcrum of Peco and Smile’s story it seems. So how will this all affect the future? But upon getting to this realization, it honestly gave me pause.

Because here’s the thing: symmetry is a pure aesthetic value. Scientists love to tell you that it’s what makes a face “pleasing to look” or something, but there’s a reason we gravitate toward certain movie stars. Because, as attractive as they often are, they also tend to have some sort of uncommon distinction to their look - something that gives them a unique quality that connects to us. In that same vein, the desire for “story symmetry” is a thing I often warn against for much the same reason. You don’t want perfect clean recycling. No, I’m not talking about set-ups and pay-offs to arcs that show growth and meaning. I’m talking about films that like to build to points of repetition or that have closed loops. Not just because these story decisions tend to be unsatisfying, it’s just often people think the symmetry does all the story work for them. Cue the infamous George Lucas explanation of “they rhyme” when talking about the big repeated beat in The Phantom Menace (note: it did not work). History merely repeating itself is not inherently an arc. For there is very little value in bringing us from Point A to Point A. In invokes a hollowness. And it’s why I often tend to talk about this bad habit in terms of JJ Abrams’ work, particularly the way those habits affect his subsequent Star Wars films, too. Ultimately, symmetry is something beautiful, but it is not inherently insightful. Any repetition of a cycle is worthless unless it finds something to say about that same cycle, especially in terms of how we internally deal with it. For instance, the finale of The Wire finds so much devastation the way some tragic arcs repeat with others, but it also sets them against hard-won victories, as if all a part of outlining how much our institutions need to change if we’re ever going to make it so that people have resources to do the same.

I know all that may seem like a tangent, but it provides the crucial understanding of why Ping Pong’s final stretch feels like a damn miracle. Because you spend so much of this series being handed what COULD BE a conventional conflict with a simple rooting interest, only to have the show cast it to the side, all in the interest of finding a more interesting pathos. The final two episodes are the best examples of this. In the pre-final match, Kazama does not beat Peco and purposefully injure his knee, which would create some yearning for Smile - our main character  and seeming hero -  to beat him in turn. Instead, Peco mounts a comeback through the act of finding internal joy. This is his fuel; the simple, idiotic joy of engaging in a game so small and frivolous. This is the act of flight. The feeling of soaring. But this works in exact tandem with Kazama’s own internal journey. Because he does not think we can fly. And because we’ve spent all episode slowly peeling back the layers of the onion of Kazama, we see that he’s often wrestling with the crushing solitude of success. Here, they offer another line that’s burned into my brain: “table tennis is nothing but pain for him.” It’s both his fuel and his prison, one in the same. But as Peco’s goofy infectiousness creeps into the match, the pain of it all can’t help but begin to disappear. Kazama’s tightness melts and even his own smile creeps in. The language of his dominance inverts and metaphors all crash together. The ball of Kazama’s final lost point crests into the air, we don’t even have to see it land. It just rises. For this is the point that Kazama realizes, yes: “we can fly.” But for both of them, flying is letting go of our own self-made prisons… I sat there in stunned silence as this pen-ultimate episode finished, utterly in awe of what I had just seen. This is a show that is miraculous at the art of undoing our worst expectation. And it is an equally miraculous set-up for the subsequent final “battle” that will be no such thing.

Going in, I felt this palpable sense of electricity. Because in a fit of anti-drama, I felt it precisely because It didn’t matter who was going to win. The very notion of “rooting interest” had long gone out the window. The show echoes this beautifully when their fellow teammates ask the coach who they should root for and Butterfly Joe simply states, “you cheer whenever someone scores a point.” But the sequence also starts with an incredible feint that lets the dread of potential expectation creep in first. Because we see that Smile has left his game boy behind (gasp!) and he’s ready to give it all against Peco. We see Butterfly Joe wrestle with the ethos of his prior advice, particularly when it comes to the knee and of mercilessly going after an opponent's weakness. Will the symmetry bring us tragedy? But like so many perfectly crafted moments in this show, we are misunderstanding what is happening. Instead, we come to see the character’s motivation, all before it unfurls before us. Because it turns out Smile’s calling for Peco’s intensity not out of competition, but because he’s been waiting for his hero.

“Think I can be like you Peco?”

The backstory spills out in an emotional rush and you realize so completely what has been there in front of you all the time. Ping Pong is the story of these two kids, their friendship, and the reveal of where Smile’s nickname really came from. No, it was not ironic. It was given when Peco first saw the pure joy of Smile following him into ping pong itself - for it was the one thing that could get his young friend to come out of his shell. And it’s the one thing that these friends had seemed to lose in the core of all the pressure of competition that had surrounded them for the last 11 episodes. When you realize what Smile’s been fighting for the entire time? When you realize why he plays? And what he’s just wanted from his friend in all these moments? The tears just started flowing. And the fact that the beautiful montage is set against one of the most bluntly existential-yet-happy children’s songs I’ve ever heard, complete with lyrics like: “We are all alive, that’s why we’re sad” makes it all the more gutting. But as the song also says, being alive is why we are happy, too.

Amidst this final match, we suddenly cut to Butterly Joe sitting with Obaba in the hall and up comes his old rival who Joe once let off the hook. Here we are at this additional moment of symmetry, one where we could unpack all the architecture of what should be the “dramatic lynchpin” of what’s happening on the court behind them. But instead, Joe playfully challenges his old rival to a game, as if evoking that all this has really been about is just an old sore feeling and nothing more. And that here, in the now, they just seek to recapture with the potential joy of the moment at hand. The three old timers soon find laughter in their exchanges and the dialogue even fades out. Thus, this terrible thing from the past that was supposed to offer some point of symmetry? It doesn’t matter. In the same way, the competition doesn’t matter. Hell, maybe even the drama of storytelling itself doesn’t matter, either. Thus, we simply cut back into the glory of Peco and Smile’s game, as the two completely lose themselves, fully going at it as friends. Their exchanges are no longer the gentle waves lapping, but instead all part of an emotional tidal wave cresting, as if reaching to the highest sun. You feel the immense high as the show cuts constantly through the images of their lives, giving us the feeling of the euphoria of being in lock step with something so transcendently emotional. Who is winning doesn’t matter. The score isn’t even shown. There is only the feeling of the moment.

Which is precisely why we cut right out of it and suddenly jump years ahead in time. Like so much of the show, this moment is at once jarring as it is seamless and confident. And what we see of the future does not have an ounce of nostalgia baked in. Just like what happened in the past with Butterfly Joe, the result was ultimately a matter of happenstance. Life moved on. Peco won and now he’s playing on the national team. And Kazama’s been incredibly successful, but he’s now out of the game and at another fork in the road. He muses “I used to hate my father now becoming like him,” but Smile helps him slowly dismiss such concerns. It’s just another cycle to trap you. Their freedom is here and now. Even Wenge, who was always looking for a way back home, ultimately found that in Japan, which was of course the very place he was trying to escape. And Smile? He was free the whole time, perhaps in a way we never appreciated. Here, he’s content with his rubix cube, content with Obaba, and content with becoming a teacher in every sense. And as all this spills out, you see so clearly that for all their fears of what would happen to them in the grand story of this series, the symmetry didn’t matter. All of them are just in the moment now, feeling their lives out - and that will never change.

Please understand that when I say “the drama didn’t matter,” I’m not talking about saying to hell with craft. The truth is that Masaaki Yuasa’s incredible series understands these storytelling tactics implicitly, along with how and why they function. This is exactly how Ping Pong: The Animation masterfully side steps that drama at the most telling moments, all to get at the rousing thematic power of something deeper. Which in a way is the most powerful kind of drama there is. To make something that feels so loose, organic, spontaneous, and yet so deftly meaningful, emotional, and compelling is the master's trick. And perhaps the only way to truly get at the most complex idea possible...

Because why do we do anything, really?

Sports stories are so wrapped up in the inherent allure of greatness and accomplishment and yet I cannot tell you how little accomplishments in life matter in the long term. Sure, in the moment, they may give us those feelings of elation and satisfaction, but those feelings can be created in so many other ways, too. And as time gently swipes away the specifics of any given accomplishment - as they become dusty trophies on walls or faded pictures of people we once resembled - it is the crucial reminder that all we really have in this world is our own feelings. Which speaks to an adage I often like to evoke every so often: that when the earth presses forward in time so far that the last etching made by the last human will have faded from the last rock, all that will have actually existed is the moments of connection and joy we were lucky enough to experience. In that space, against the undeniable morass of malaise, the only thing we will be glad for… is the moments where we flew.

Love ya, Ping Pong.

Love ya, all.

<3HULK