Heartracing anime 100 Meters finds it all in a few glorious seconds

This kind of emotional connection by proxy, the excuses of running or video games or volleyball or fighting aliens, is standard-issue for the genre, undergirding plenty of platonic masculine relationships and the existential questions lurking beneath. Why do they push themselves? If they’re not the best, why race at all? Why devote so much of your life to one hyper-specific, seemingly juvenile pursuit? These typical concerns are surely answered with artful elegance in Uoto’s manga, but in Iwaisawa’s hands, there’s another layer underneath the athletic navel-gazing—something primal and raw.

100 Meters stalls and cramps when it’s stuck in hallways and auditoriums, where older side characters like Kaido (Kenjiro Tsuda) and Saizu (Koki Uchiyama) wax on about running at such length that even Haruki Murakami would be checking his smartwatch. But when it’s on the track, Iwaisawa’s film unleashes the myriad shifting styles that made On-Gaku such a vital garage rocker. 

Iwaisawa’s rotoscoping weighs down the characters, adds realistic heft to their muscles and movements, their bodies hyper-physical set against more painterly backgrounds. The world fades away behind the athlete’s legs and feet. Nothing else matters when they’re running, and that’s clear in every frame. Then, mid-race, the animation bursts free from reality. Faces grimace against the wind, eyes bulge, heartbeats and the percussive smack of sneakers blend into a single thump. It’s animalistic, all that philosophizing about sport reduced to a heartracing sensory experience. Some races are captured in long unbroken takes, some are blacked-out and only communicated through sound. One, set during the pouring rain, is as exciting and beautiful as anything in animation this year.

If the rest of the film matched these transcendent moments, 100 Meters would have built up a personalized rivalry worthy of the sports-movie pantheon. But despite the plot’s template, the friction between its racers is off-handed; this isn’t a movie about one sprinter running against another, but several sprinters running against themselves—against the dozen-second dash they’ve chosen as their lifelong foe. There’s beauty in that, if not a lot of drama. It’s just another part of the film’s uneasiness, the same kind that comes up when auteurs find themselves consumed by the Marvel machine after a heartfelt indie or two. Iwaisawa’s punk spirit resists being trampled by the sports drama’s game plan, but it does feel limited when confined to a single stretch of track.

Director: Kenji Iwaisawa
Writer: Yasuyuki Muto   
Starring: Tori Matsuzaka, Atsumi Tanezaki, Shota Sometani, Aoi Yūki, Koki Uchiyama, Kenjiro Tsuda
Release Date: October 10, 2025