Sports anime are incredibly exciting, dramatic, emotionally charged and just an all-round great time. Various sports have found representation in anime, with entire narratives being devoted to particular sporting codes.
While one of the most enjoyed individual sports in the world, tennis anime don't usually get enormously popular; however, of the ones that have, Baby Steps (2014) is arguably the best one of the lot. Here's why this anime is particularly underrated, and serves as great representation for tennis within the sports anime niche.
First Serve – The Plot
For those unfamiliar with the series, Baby Steps follows the journey of Maruo Eiichiro (known henceforth as "Ei-chan"), a top-performing high schooler known for his extraordinary organisational skills, discipline, and diligence, who decides to take up a sport because he feels that he needs the exercise. When he sees a flyer, Ei-chan joins the Southern Tennis Club, where he meets fellow first-year high school student Natsu Takasaki, a talented and passionate player who has her mind set on going pro. In contrast to those lofty ambitions, Maruo is simply playing tennis as a means to a relatively mundane end: improved physical health. However, as
Since tennis is an individual sport for the most part, Ei-chan felt that it would best suit his busy schedule, and be a lot less pressure than a team sport. However, Ei-chan soon realises what he has gotten himself into, and even sooner develops an intense love for tennis as he continues to play the game and improve.
The Diligent Protagonist
One of the things that makes Baby Steps stand head and shoulders above other anime about tennis is the protagonist. Ei-chan is not particularly gifted or especially good at tennis at first, which also makes the series a bit more realistic than most other sports anime. What makes Ei-chan particularly extraordinary is not his physical prowess or raw talent, but his insatiable desire to learn, record and repeat what he has learned.
The series' use of his incredible academic ability to justify one of the things Baby Steps does pretty similarly to most other sports anime – have their main characters experience unprecedented levels of growth in their chosen sporting code. Ei-chan takes notes in every single class, and these notes are a commodity in not only his class, but his entire grade. People find themselves learning a lot more easily when borrowing his notes, and it is this methodical note-taking that makes Ei-chan's passion obvious, but also helps to justify his rapid growth.
Understanding "The Zone"
"The Zone" is a concept that is well-known around the world in various contexts. It's something that is experienced by various groups of people and can often be described as a moment of absolute focus and rhythm where an individual is performing at the peak of their mental and physical ability. This concept features fairly heavily in Baby Steps, and it is part of Ei-chan's unique arsenal of skills developed away from the tennis court that have become integral to his growth and style of play. In Baby Steps, The Zone is understood as the perfect marriage between a player's instinct and reason, combining to elevate their general style of play.
The Journey Isn't Too Long
Given the lofty nature of the kinds of objectives that the main characters of sport anime tend to have, the overarching arcs presented by sports anime tend to go on for a very long time. In fact, any anime featuring a character's journey towards a specific goal will have a tendency to make said journey long, convoluted but for the simple fact that such journeys are particularly arduous.
While still keeping a foot planted in what is realistic, Baby Steps is an anime that only has two 25-episode seasons. This relatively small episode count means that the series spends more time overall fleshing out its characters, and Maruo's relationship with tennis itself is particularly interesting in its development and pace.
Great Pay-Off
This builds a little on the previous point. Given the series' good use of pacing and stakes throughout, the journey we see Ei-chan undertake from amateur to intermediate has its fair share of disappointments, but it also knows how to make Ei-chan's personal victories even sweeter. This is perhaps Baby Steps's strongest element: it hooks the audience, crescendos in graceful fashion; however, the lack of a third season to cap off the series may leave fans rather frustrated, especially with how well the series handles itself over the course of 50 episodes.
Overall, Baby Steps wins over other tennis anime because it combines good pacing with realistic but unstifled expressions, characters and concepts while also keeping itself rooted in the basic physics of tennis as a sport. Hopefully, a third season of Baby Steps will one day be on the cards for Studio Pierrot, who were responsible for the production of the first and second seasons.