Skate-Leading Stars May Have the Best Imaginary Sport in Anime

Production

This is going to be a yada yada paragraph on production. I mean it was fine. The boys were cute, the colours were nice, the models remained pretty consistent throughout the show.

Now, would this show have been better with more impressive animation? 1000%! I remember thinking I love figure skating but the skating in Skate-Leading Stars isn’t all that fun to watch. It wasn’t bad, I’ll even say it was fairly realistic. The choreography of jumps was on point and looked a lot like what you see from real skaters. However, whit the possibility of bending the laws of physics to your own will and designing costumes without any regard for functionality or cost, I expected the skate-leading competition to be more extravagant.

But that’s more of a complaint in that the production could have been better if they had more time and resources. I feel like you can say that about every single show so I’m not going to gripe about it too much. I will say there were no surprises on the production side.

Story & Characters

I already spent a paragraph talking about how cool the sport of skate-Leading was without explaining what it is. I mentioned figure skating, so you probably have an idea. Skate-leading is essentially group figure skating. A team of five skaters put together a group choreography in which every member has their own part. Sometimes they are synchronized, other times the parts come together, and play off each other.

Now the cynics out there may tell you that there is absolutely no reason to split up what is currently a single or couples sport between 5 people, other than an excuse to have more characters on screen. But I disagree. I think the way a choreography comes together with a small troupe (4 to 8 people) is very different than solo or couple. You can easily see it in dancing and figure skating is pretty much dancing on ice.

I personally think there’s a lot of potential in this sport and that it could be a particularly impressive spectator sport. However, seeing at how simple and instinctive the premise of this sport is, I’m thinking that there’s probably a reason it doesn’t exist. Something I just don’t know about figure skating that makes it unsuitable as a team sport. I still stand by the fact that if they announced it at the next winter Olympics, I would watch it. I would go out of my way to do so.

But enough about the imaginary sport in Skate-Leading stars, what about the show itself. Well, it’s a Sports! Anime.

What, you wanted more?

I’m not sure of what my exact publishing schedule will be for all the posts I’ve been writing lately. As such, it may not be obvious to you that I’ve gone on something of a sports anime binge lately. I watched a whole bunch in a row and now they are all clunking around in my head, competing against each other. Skate-Leading Stars is somewhere in the middle.

I really like Sports! anime and so I quite enjoyed the show. I thought the characters were fun enough, I got into the spirit of competition and I cheered from my favourite team. But I’m not going to pretend there’s anything particularly special or unusual about the show. Ok, aside from the fact that I really like the sport they made up. Other than that, it’s… a Sports! anime.

The character archetypes are what you would expect, the narrative structure and arcs all follow the Sports! Formula pretty closely and the resolution is fun but expected.

I guess you could say Sasugai is slightly unusual in that he wants to become a coach rather than an athlete but when you really look at the character, he’s been done before. He’s the guy that’s better at the theory of the sport than the practice so he can give everyone else great advice even if he can’t do it himself. He’s also the slightly sadistic slave driver type who is constantly pushing the team to work harder and comes off as a little ominous. You’ve seen a character like that before. The fact that this guy is openly pursuing the title of coach from the start doesn’t change the fact that it’s a common archetype.

For the record, there’s nothing wrong with common archetypes or having a lot of tropes in anime. Sasugai was my favourite character, I thought he was a hoot. So, when I’m not saying that the character was bad. Just that you’ve seen his type before. And if you like that, then you’ll like him.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been trying to say all along. Skate-Leading Stars is a Sports! anime, and if you like Sports! Anime then you’ll probably like Skate-Leading Stars. It’s not going to change your life but it could make a couple of afternoons more entertaining for you!

You might like this anime if:

You want to see another skating anime and aren’t expecting Yuri on Ice.

I save all my screencaps on my Pinterest and you can find more there if you are interested. But I still like to show you a few in the post. If you’re like me, screencaps are something that really helps you decide to watch an anime or not.