The Only Thing You Can Do Is Believe In Yourself

One thing that really gets me out of my chair every time is the idea of somebody leaving it all out there. Just going for it regardless of the outcome.

One of the things that sticks out most to me from watching 100 Meters is watching Togashi’s constantly evolving mentality in regards to his running. From being touted as a prodigy and effortlessly clearing out races as a kid to an insecure and anxious teen worried about the results of his races. The pressure of his early success built up so much that he just couldn't handle it and walked away from everything. Not that uncommon to see in young athletes but the really shocking thing is how much this mentality sticks with him even after he reintegrates with the world of running and becomes a professional track and field athlete for an agency. He continues to compete but the idea of losing still weighs on him. The ugly truth of it all is that Togashi has been running to avoid losing, but what happens when he’s no longer fast enough to escape defeat? It leads him down the road of crisis, and when it's revealed he’s got an injury that could potentially cause permanent harm if he doesn't cool off from running for a while just before the national championship; he finds himself at the foot of the most important decision he might ever make.

The injury Togashi sustains calls back to an earlier point in the movie where during their last race his classmate Komiya ends up hurting himself in a last ditch effort to finally claim victory over his only friend. Komiya put it all on the line for something that was ultimately meaningless, a race that maybe only he would ever remember the result of. But that was enough.

More so than he even realizes and it eventually leads him to a full on meltdown in one of the movie's most impactful scenes where he decides to give some kids advice ahead of their school’s Sports Day.

Giving out advice that you yourself struggle to follow is a trap we all fall into but really it's a subconscious response. You know what you should be doing and while it's easy to go and say that to someone else it's infinitely harder to act on it yourself. If we could all be as driven as we needed to be, the world would be a utopia. Being able to execute on your drive is the key thing that separates the doers from everybody else. We’ve all got dreams but how willing are you to go and run towards them at full speed; leaving any and everything else aside? I’m not gonna tell you what Togashi does on the off chance you have seen 100 Meters but I strongly encourage you to do so, it’s one of the best movies I’ve seen all year and maybe in my whole ass life. 

In a similar vein, I recently watched Ping Pong the Animation and it kinda broke my brain. Man it was incredible and it has its finger on the exact same pulse as 100M. I have no clue if Uoto was inspired by it or not but I’m choosing to believe so for the sake of this blogpost. It's a fairly similar story but as a TV show it's allowed to spend a bit more time asking questions about what it means to be talented and the kinds of sacrifice it takes to be the best. These are ideas that 100M flirts with but the movie's runtime prevents it from really digging into. The character work is also really in depth in Ping Pong. Its band of misfits all brought under one roof by the beautiful sport of table tennis are much more realized than the characters in 100M and that lets us into their minds much easier. Somebody like Smile who is a ridiculously talented Ping Pong player but ultimately has no real drive to win. To him the outcomes of the games are largely meaningless and he’d rather someone who cares more have the win for their own sake. Ironically this is something that can only live under the surface because even without seeing him play experts are able to determine that he's good AND that he's holding back just from the sounds of his game whenever he plays against his friend Peco. A stark contrast to the characters of 100M whose entire worldviews are myopically tied to the result of a 10 second explosion of force and energy that is over just as fast as it starts. Smile’s inability and unwillingness to go all out draws the attention of many players who are mostly curious to see what kind of monster he can be at his full potential. It's a really compelling narrative and it gets told via some truly special visual storytelling and plain good writing that wraps you into this tale incredibly effectively. The moral of the story once again being that you have to go for it. You have to go all out or else it's not worth doing. 

There's a humanity to the story of both Ping Pong and 100M that I just can’t get enough of. A real bleeding heart that pulls me in and has me counting along to every beat. It fills me with an infectious energy that makes me feel like I can do anything I set my mind to. That any task I put my mind to no matter how impossible can be put within reach as long as I’m willing to go out on a limb and grab it. That's gonna round things out to the last show in this trifecta that I’ve created in my mind and the way it echoes through both other shows and that's Orb: On The Movements of the Earth. 

Orb is a real brain breaker because I initially dismissed it for being a show about Heliocentrism and I thought that was really silly. That might be the biggest L of my “career” as a guy who recommends stuff online. It's about so much more than that. It's about betting on yourself and about betting on the future. About the pursuit of knowledge and truth in a society that would rather obscure that information for the sake of its own maintenance than show its people the truth. It’s something that really struck me as I watched it, given the state of the world now. In a lot of ways the scope of Orb is lightyears greater than that of 100M or Ping Pong but the core of it remains the exact same. In lockstep with the other shows I’ve talked about here it's also about developing an assuredness in yourself so strong that you’d bet against the world, it’s about going out on your own sword. I mention it last because in Orb the consequences for “losing” and “winning” are incredibly detached from the result of a race or a match. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s about running that race knowing it could be your last and actually coming to the realization that it is your last. That this is it. Things are much more permanent in Orb and while that's great for the drama aspect, it also reinforces just how incredible the wills of your characters are. The protagonist of Orb, Rafal, is someone who excels in saying what people want to hear. Floating through life using his smarts to know when to get ahead and when to fall back. An instinct for survival. This gets flipped on its head when Rafal is introduced to the idea of heliocentrism, the heretical idea that the Earth isn't the center of the universe, and it drives him to places he never expected. He got a hint of a compulsion greater than just survival and approval. He got a hint of the idea that what everybody else believes isn't the full truth. Learning that takes him to places you couldn't even imagine and sets off a chain of events that bring us to the world as we know it. But the fact is that Rafal is standing on the shoulders of giants. Many people suffered and died standing for this idea. They took that bet on themselves and lost everything for it, but their will carries on through their research and their teaching and the idea that there will be those in the future who will take on that same responsibility.

In Ping Pong, Smile is mentored by the coach of the Ping Pong team who takes special interest in his latent talent. And we learn that he is one such giant, he is somebody who in his prime was a player who could win at a high level, but instead of going for it all he held back and it left him where is now. Behind anybody great there’s always somebody else who could have been even greater. Behind Smile there's Butterfly Joe, behind Rafal there's the Heretic and behind Komiya there's Togashi. While the onus is on you to take the jump, nobody can do everything alone. 

I was a mentor to young people for a long time, I was a tutor and theater instructor and I had run into a lot of people who had given up before even reaching the starting line. There’s nothing worse than giving up on yourself. Especially since we can truly do anything we put our minds to, sometimes it just takes a little pushing. Even me man, I didn’t come out as a savant, I had to work on it, pay my dues, put some hours in! But it's because I had mentors that believed in me that I was even willing to go out there and try. I never fancied myself a writer, I still don’t really know how good I am. But I’m going for it. It's all I can do for now, it's what I owe myself. Being able to put it all out there. I hope if you're reading this and thinking to yourself about something, any little spark of an idea you have, that you’ll go for it. For your own sake but also because I think you can, and if I think you can then damn it you can think that too. 

Circling back to the art in question I do want to walk you though how I got here. Walk with me. 

I’ve been strangely compelled to write this. Finishing Ping Pong a couple of weeks ago built up this kinetic energy in me that I just have to get out. I just had to do something and so I wrote about it because that's What I Do. But I’ve also had this itch to re-watch 100M strike me out of nowhere, honestly part of the reason why I ended up watching Ping Pong after all these years of hearing about it and having it on my watch list was partly me chasing the dragon of how much that film moved me, that and a cosign from my dear friend. Boy did I get more than I bargained for. I think I feel even more strongly about Ping Pong. I loved, loved, loved it. It's an absolutely emotional and romantic (in the literary sense) story with a bumping soundtrack and super distinct and captivating visuals. That ticks all the boxes for me man I don't need anything more. That's an instant favorite you coulda bet on it. I think sacrificing conventional aesthetics for drawings that are much looser and more expressive really pushed the story to incredible heights. The way the entire world warps around some of those later matches is really brilliant and the use of visual metaphor was incredibly striking. The fact that the Hero that Peco represented was Kamen Rider Ichigo, but they couldn't say it was (probably for copyright reasons) was honestly really charming. Kamen Rider Forever. My favorite character was probably Kong Wenge. I love watching a character who thinks he's better than he is and has to really face the music and find out they aren't quite that good. It's one of my favorite character arcs and his is really exemplary. The Kensuke Ushio soundtrack on this thing is nuts too, “Hero Theme” is a monster track and it's been stuck in my head since the show ended. I was listening to it while writing some of this exact post. Man it was really incredible and I’m a huge Yuasa fan so getting to see him work was such a treat. Man’s a genius, full stop. One of the best anime directors ever.

I don’t know if I want to talk about Orb here, because I kinda want to save that for a separate post. But realistically I don’t know if that post is ever going to happen. I think it’s been too long and I don't even have that many screenshots. I love it though, don’t get that confused. It’s really quite great. But I have to put a limit on this because I could just keep writing forever. So this is it. Thanks for reading :).