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Grande Road animeVideo: Japanese anime series centres around teen bike racer
They love their anime in Japan and they love their bike racing too, so it's surprising we haven't heard of more animated series about bikes. Yowamushi Pedal from Japanese film giant Toho looks promising though, as these trailers show.
According to Chris Beveridge on Fandom Post the story centres around Sakamichi Onoda, a rather timid, anime-loving first-year student at Sohoku High School, who regularly rides the 90km to Tokyo and back to meet other anime and manga fans.
In high school he meets Imaizumi Shunsuke, a renowned cyclist since middle school, and Naruko Shoukichi, who swept the Kansai cycling championship, and joins the school's bike racing club club. All kinds of trials and rigorous training await Onoda, but with the support of his many friends and upperclassmen, the talented road racer inside him begins to emerge.
The three trailers below for the Grande Road series promote the imminent second season, which will feature inter high school racing; the DVD and Bu-Ray release of the first season; and the new characters in the second.
We previously brought you news of Hill Climb Girl, featuring Bradley Wiggins as the inspiration for a young Japanese girl to beat a rival up the hill to her school, but this is the first cycling-centred anime series we've heard about.
We confess we know almost nothing about anime, so if there are any fans out there who can tell us if this is likely to appear with English subtitles, we'd love to hear from you.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
Latest Comments
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Sounds like the APPGCW report is going to be interesting reading.
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are you a complete numpty??? it doesn't have disk brakes......
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Yes, but all religious Jews are by default Zionists. We beseech G-D 3 times a day in our prayers to gather us to the Land of Israel and "Gather us...
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Isn't that basically what we did to our High Streets & Main Streets in the 1960s?
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Almost - but apparently not quite. There are in Northern Ireland.
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If you'd read it a bit more carefully you'll see that it also requires each new home to have at least three parking spaces. So it shouldn't be a...
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But how on earth do you expect people to know that's not allowed?...
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7 comments
Do Japanese riders really have green and blue spiky hair and are prone to screaming in the middle of a race?
Tetsuo...! Kaneda...!
Is casual bike riding also featured in anime often, or is there more of a focus on racing?
Is casual bike riding also featured in anime often, or is there more of a focus on racing?
Yup. Cycling is a pretty normal thing in Japan.
Awesome. Can they just anime the Tour next please ?
There is another series called "Over Drive", which was released in the mid 2000s ish. Just the one series at 20+ episodes. The manga, too, is finished in case you prefer reading.
http://myanimelist.net/anime/2112/Over_Drive
As far as the subtitles are concerned, there are many (accurate) fan-subs out there but, ahem, it requires methods that are frowned upon.
I'm not sure as to the legality of it, but the entire first series is available to watch here (www.animefave.tv/yowamushi-pedal), with English subtitles. I don't know whether they're fan-subtitled or not, upon which depends the likelihood of the DVDs being released in the UK. I think it's a relatively big thing in Japan (big enough to get a second series anyway), but I'm not sure if it's on the 'Naruto/Full Metal Alchemist/etc.' level of big. i.e. The level of big that gets imported overseas. I hope so though!
Anyway, despite the series largely being aimed at 13 year-old boys, it's clear that the writer has a real love of the sport. I've got a massive soft spot for the series, largely because of how well the idiosyncrasies of cycling have been woven into the typical anime framework of near-continuous plot-twists. It's well observed, often charming, slightly goofy, and likely to put a smile on your face.
If you can get into the mindset of a 13 year-old boy, it's well worth watching. And if you can't, you might still enjoy it too, as long as nobody catches you with it on.