100 METERS

An animated film set in Japan. Togashi runs fast as a child. Nobody at school can catch him. One day a boy catches him. Komiya has just arrived. He beats Togashi in the first race and does it without effort. Togashi cannot accept it. From there the film moves through years. Primary school, middle school, high school, university and the professional level. Both of them run a hundred metres. Togashi works. Training, technique, the start, the number of strides, and hundredths of a second. Komiya comes from somewhere else. He was told he had to run and he does not like it. The narrative gives both of them fully. Neither is the hero and neither is the obstacle. An injury comes. Then a fall, then a return. A race lasts ten seconds. The narrative sometimes stretches those ten seconds across minutes. What the narrative is interested in is not racing but measure: its idea is that a person defines himself only by comparison with another, and does not know what he is without that person. The running sequences are the technical centre. The production combines rotoscoping with hand drawing; the movement is taken from a real body and drawn over. The director used the same method in his previous film. The sound design is part of the narrative too. During a race the crowd is cut away and only breath and footfalls remain. The source is Uoto's manga; a short series published entirely within nine months. The screenplay is by Yasuyuki Muto and the music by Hiroaki Tsutsumi. The film screened at the Annecy animation festival on 12 June 2025, opened in Japan on 19 September, and went to streaming on 31 December 2025. Tori Matsuzaka, Shota Sometani, Kenjiro Tsuda and Koki Uchiyama are in the voice cast. Kenji Iwaisawa directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes sports animation and formally distinctive work. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the narrative is slow, the speech sparse, and outside the races there is almost no incident.