It gets you with the part sports anime usually skips: the meeting where a coach gently tells you your body is done. Joutarou Aragaki is twenty-nine, a national team veteran whose landings keep betraying him, and the show refuses to make his decline dramatic. It makes it domestic. His daughter Rei watching from the sidelines, a parakeet in the house, and then Leo, the self-declared ninja who attaches himself to the family and won't leave, turning a grief-quiet home into something loud and warm again. MAPPA animates the gymnastics with real weight, the chalk, the wobble on a dismount, the difference between a routine that works and one that almost does. Tetsuo Minamino's contempt for a fading legend lands because he isn't wrong on paper. Eleven episodes about whether a man is allowed to want one more try, and the answer arrives in a hug, not a medal.

Joutarou Aragaki, a gymnast on the Japanese national team known as Samurai for his hairstyle, has given his life to the sport. Years after a shoulder injury that followed his wife's death, his hard training still brings no improvement, and his coach, Amakusa, advises him to retire. His lively, supportive nine-year-old daughter Rei is always at his side. A trip to Ego Wonderland meant to break the news to her instead ends in a strange encounter with Leonardo, a self-styled ninja who follows them home. Set in 2002, this sports drama sees Joutarou shock Japan by announcing he will keep competing.