It gets you with the freeze frames. Dezaki paints Hiromi mid-swing into a pastel postcard, holds it a beat too long, and suddenly a high school tennis rally carries the weight of a life decision. This is the movie that proves sports anime melodrama is a craft, not a crutch: split screens stacking three angles of one serve, Akio Sugino's needle-sharp faces, Munakata standing there saying nothing while a fifteen-year-old decides whether she can survive being chosen. And Ryuuzaki, the Madame Butterfly, is the real ache of it, the upperclassman Hiromi worships turning into the person who has to let her be better. The gut punch isn't the tournament. It's Hiromi realizing, after all the crying and the quitting talk, that she loves this stupid sport anyway. Forty-plus years later people still steal these shots, and nobody lands them like this.

Hiromi starts high school and signs up for the tennis club out of admiration for Ryuuzaki, a senior who is the team's top player and whose graceful style on court has earned her the nickname Madame Butterfly. When the new coach, Jin Munakata, picks the inexperienced freshman to compete in an upcoming tournament, Hiromi thinks about giving up tennis altogether. Deep down, she comes to see that she loves the sport after all. She goes back to the club, and under Munakata's coaching her talent begins to flourish. Over time she forms a strong emotional attachment to him, unaware that a chronic illness has put his life at risk. The film is a sports drama with a thread of romance.