The 5 Best Tennis Anime to Watch After the U.S. Open

Clockwise from top left: Stars Align,Aim for the Ace!,The Prince of Tennis, and Baby Steps.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture

This year’s U.S. Open has already proved to be must-watch TV, riddled with dramatic moments like Coco Gauff’s comeback victory against Mirra Andreeva in the women’s singles quarterfinals and narratives like the fact that at least one whole American man will definitely advance to the men’s singles final after Friday’s semi. But the championship has also served (tennis pun!) as a reminder of how exhilarating all that volleying, grunting, and racket abuse can look in animation. We already ranked the sport’s greatest scenes in live action — why not consider tennis anime? Japanese animation has brought the game to life for decades, capturing the spectacle and grit its athletes bring to the court, and its history has trailed the sport’s development; in our first pick, the characters are still playing with vintage white balls. So with love in our hearts (second tennis pun!!), here are the best tennis anime, plus a bonus title for lovers of another racket sport.

An early prototype for several of the titles on this list, this adaptation of Sumika Yamamoto’s manga of the same name is one of anime’s ultimate, early wimp-to-whiz sports journeys. The story beats are familiar, in part, because Yamamoto’s manga introduced many of them to the form. We first meet Hiromi Oka as a hopelessly anxious, daydreaming 15-year-old who takes an interest in her high-school tennis club after seeing the poise and power that an older player brings to the court; bit by bit, Hiromi improves her game through grit and determination, and naturally that older player becomes one of her biggest rivals. Yamamoto’s story — and the TV adaptations overseen by Osamu Dezaki, a Swiss Army–knife anime director known for bringing action, sports, and soapy high-school melodrama to life onscreen — spends a huge chunk of time on Hiromi’s insecurities. Can she even hit a tennis ball? Do her friends hate her? Is she madly in love with her coach? The animation is over 50 years old, and even by the standards of the day, it often looks limited and stiff, but like all of Dezaki’s best-known work, Aim for the Ace! has undeniable style, and its action plays out over poppy watercolor backgrounds that serve as reminders of how tactile the medium could once be. ➽Streaming onSling.

Long-running sports anime titles have produced many heroic dudes — Joe Yabuki of Tomorrow’s Joe, Hanamichi Sakuragi of Slam Dunk, Shoyo Hinata of Haikyu!! — and The Prince of Tennis gave us 12-year-old prodigy Ryoma Echizen. The lefty player stuns his opponents from the first of well over 250 episodes (we count the sequels and specials), and it’s a diverting watch, if a little repetitive and unwieldy with its sprawling cast of testosterone-fueled adolescents. As my colleague Nick Quah has written before, this classic often plays more like a sports fantasy; by the end of the series run, Echizen is returning serves through exploding concrete walls. But sometimes heightened hype is just what the sports-medicine specialist ordered. The Prince of Tennis delivers on the same sorts of shonen dynamics that turned shows like Naruto and My Hero Academia into beloved hits — it just uses tennis to get there. ➽Streaming onCrunchyroll.

If you want a show whose entire format replicates the rapid-fire volleys of a tense match, Teekyu might be your pick. Every episode runs for two minutes — oddly a perfect length for the microdrama era, despite the fact that it was first released nearly 15 years ago — and follows the antics of the teen girls on the Kameido High tennis club. Nothing in this show is serious: Whether the characters are using toilet plungers as tennis rackets, magically duplicating themselves for a doubles match (and delivering a sly animation production joke in the process), or occasionally leaning into the uncomfortable anime trope of teens getting way too horny, it’s all played for mile-a-minute laughs. Even when not every joke lands, the amount of plot and character work the show crams into an episode’s run time can be a bit staggering and may even prompt you to rewind if you can’t read the subtitles fast enough. ➽Streaming onCrunchyroll.

This adaptation of Hikaru Katsuki’s manga is possibly the best straightforward coming-of-age tennis anime there is, so it’s a shame it’s not currently available in the States, despite being simulcast on Crunchyroll when it was released. The premise is relatively simple: The out-of-shape nerd Eiichirō Maruo takes an interest in tennis after being encouraged by Natsu, “the cutest girl in our grade” and a longtime player. True to the title, Eiichirō’s path to tennis dominance is slow and steady — he only successfully returns his first serve in the second episode — and part of his shtick is that his studious note-taking helps him get better at the sport. But that deliberate pace allows the audience to steadily warm to the characters, especially the relationship between Eiichirō and Natsu, and acclimate to the sport as well. In the pivotal tennis scenes, the animation gets markedly more fluid, the camera following Eiichirō’s limbs as he learns how to put his entire body into a given swing. ➽ Unavailable to stream legally.

Best known for directing the massively popular high-fantasy anime The Vision of Escaflowne, Kazuki Akane’s most recent major work is a charming series about middle-schoolers trying to whip their struggling soft-tennis boys’ club into shape. But true to Akane’s reputation, the original title isn’t some simplistic or trope-y take on the sports-anime genre but rather a commentary on camaraderie, gender and class identity, and child abuse. The first episode ends with a new transfer student, hard up for cash, eagerly signing up for the club in exchange for payment, but as the credits roll, we watch his father beat him and steal the money. It’s a jarring moment in a show otherwise defined by its rounded designs and easygoing pace. Using soft tennis as a narrative device in the first place was critical to Akane’s vision: “It’s a sport that the children play purely to have fun,” he has said. “I wanted to make a drama around that.” For the most part, the choices pay off big time. The one big downside of Stars Align is that it is, essentially, a half-finished story: Only 12 episodes and a follow-up “Special Fan Movie” short were produced of an originally planned run of 24, but what we got is still masterfully done anime. ➽Streaming onCrunchyroll.

Attention, Marty Supreme fans: This is the table-tennis anime you need. Ping Pong: The Animation is a character study of Peco and Smile, teens who play for their high-school team and wrestle with their own respective feelings about the sport, battling adolescent malaise, crushing defeat, and injury along the way. The show’s art style evokes its manga source material, created by Taiyō Matsumoto, but stages its action in hyperexaggerated poses and almost grotesquely sketchlike renditions of the human body. It’s as if director Masaaki Yuasa and his animators aimed to showcase all the contortive effects a racket sport could have on the body and soul during a tense match; they frame their shots with an eye toward extreme contrasts, selectively pepper in repetitive editing and dialogue for emphasis, and lean hard into dream logic. Ping Pong: The Animation isn’t about tennis tennis, of course, but it is earnest in the way the best adolescent sports anime can be and singular in how it visualizes the soaring highs of athleticism. The soundtrack slaps, too.➽Streaming onCrunchyroll.

The 5 Best Tennis Anime to Watch After the U.S. Open