The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Medalist

Tsukasa, whose dreams were crushed. Inori, left to fend for herself. These two share a dream and their tenacity may be the only thing that sees them through. Their destination is the ice...on the world's stage.

Medalist is based on the award-winning manga series by Tsurumaikada. The anime series is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on Saturdays.

God, I miss Yuri!!! on Ice. There's been a hole in my heart ever since the official announcement that Ice Adolescence was cancelled, and I don't think anything will ever fill it. While Medalist, a series about an adult man who agrees to coach a preteen girl who shows promise on the ice, won't take its place, it does give me a chance to reflect on how much I've learned about the sport since that fateful day in October of 2016. I know the difference between ice dancing and figure skating. I (kind of) know the difference between a salchow and a toe loop. I know that high-level skaters sacrifice any hope of a normal childhood from an early age in exchange for the hope of competing on the world stage. That last bit is what Medalist is about.

It's something that tends to get lost in sports anime, which tend to be more about the epic highs and lows of competition and how the real game is the friends we made along the way. They'll touch on the risk and sacrifice, but they often elide how sometimes, that sacrifice really doesn't work out. All you're left with is pain and regret for the life you never got to live, because the sport was your life. But there's also the potential for regret if you never try; it's the Schrodinger's Cat of heartache. Medalist pays tribute to both sides of that dichotomy: the former in Inori's older sister, who started skating at a young age but had a promising career cut off by an injury, and the latter in Tsukasa, who waited until he was a teenager to start skating and felt like he was never able to reach his potential, despite being an accomplished ice dancer.

Naturally, Inori chooses the potential of regretting trying over the regret of not trying; otherwise we wouldn't have an anime, would we?

That kind of emotional honesty is appealing to begin with, but it would be nothing without good characters to go along with it. Inori and Tsukasa make a good pair, combining Tsukasa's loud-mouthed, even aggressive enthusiasm with Inori's timid anxiety. Both are coming from similar places of lacking confidence and self-worth, but with very different results. Inori gets some emotional catharsis this episode; I watched the dub, and the tremble in her voice as she said, “I don't like myself very much right now,” squeezed my heart. Tsukasa is less immediately vulnerable, but his projection of his regrets onto Inori has potential to be the source of some interesting character drama.

All of this is tied together by a surprisingly competent production by Studio ENGI. While the sketchy, jittery art doesn't totally translate from the manga, Inori's excellent face game has successfully made the jump. The CG skating program that opened the program gave me pause, since I prefer my sports anime to be hand-drawn any day, but the other bits on the ice looked quite nice.

You can tell a lot about the quality of an anime (or any piece of media, really) from the “tightness” of the script. How much of it is extraneous? How much of it is directly connected to the overall story being told? This applies to everything, from the spoken dialogue to the jokes and visuals as well.

For example, the first meeting between our two heroes and the chase that ensues. While it seems to be just a silly, extended joke at the moment, Inori's actions have a much deeper meaning as the episode goes on. Her grinding a rail while fleeing in panic shows both her athleticism and lack of fear in the face of danger. The collection of worms (an entire bag's worth) shows just how dedicated she is to getting her time on the rink once you know how she got them—how she's doing everything that an 11-year-old can do to follow her dream. Not a single moment in this episode is wasted or irrelevant and so it does an amazing job of exploring our lead characters.

Inori is stuck in her sister's shadow—oppressed by her mother's fear. She knows what she was put on this planet to do and being denied it due to actions not her own is killing her inside. Meanwhile, Tsukasa found what he was meant to do but too late to become a true competitor—forcing him to tie himself to the coattails of other, better-honed skaters to reach any kind of meaningful success in the sport. They are a pair of kindred souls and it makes sense why Tsukasa is so passionate about making sure Inori gets the chance he wasn't able to create for himself.

Visually, the show looks great. The opening scene serves as a peek into what heights we can expect and the episode overall is fluid and full of detail. There are a ton of subtle animations I loved—like showing the shifting of weight from the inside edge to the outside edge of the ice skate.

I made sure to check out the dub as this is one of the shows to get a true simul-dub. The performances are fine throughout the whole cast—and you can tell that Madeline Dorroh is giving her all to bring Inori's tortured young soul to life. However, it cannot be understated that the role of Inori was made for Natsumi Haruse—literally. In a 2018 tweet, a year-and-a-half before the Medalist manga began its run, author Tsurumaikada tweeted (translated from Japanese) "I would also like to draw a figure skating manga that would someday be made into an anime, and have Natsumi Haruse play the main role!" So if you're interested in the original author's intent, this is a show to watch subtitled.

And make no mistake, you should watch this anime. This episode is a masterclass in scriptwriting that weaves a tight and emotional start to the story. Add to that above-average animation quality and a great voice cast and I can't imagine not wanting to tune into this show week after week.

Let me get this out of the way: do not go into Medalist expecting Yuri!!! on Ice!!; they both may be about figure skating, but that's really about it. The second thing to know is that the source manga for Medalist is really, really good, which at this point is both a statement about how the anime is almost certainly going to pick up steam, but also is to say that if you like this episode, and don't want to wait for next week to see more, you've got options.

One of the strengths of the story is already starting to become evident in this introductory episode – the parallel between Inori and her would-be coach Tsukasa. At age eleven, Inori's older than most kids looking to take up serious skating, something Tsukasa knows all too well as someone who started at fourteen and never quite managed the career he hoped for. He clearly sees himself in Inori, who is trying hard to convince her mother to let her skate because with every fiber of her being, she yearns to be a figure skater. It helps that Tsukasa can see Inori's innate talent, but what he's really noticing is his younger self in the girl. By getting her mother to allow her to skate, he's soothing his child self, giving her the future he feels he didn't quite get.

He's so invested that he comes across as brash and perhaps obnoxious, because he's essentially yelling at a potential student's mother and pooh-poohing her fears. Inori's older sister skated until an injury, so she's understandably reluctant to allow her younger daughter to enter the same field. That, too, feels remarkably grounded, because why would a parent who loves her children want to see them get hurt? But it's also astoundingly easy for parents to at times forget that just because something happened to one kid, it won't necessarily happen to another. Just because I broke bones doing virtually anything doesn't mean that my sisters did, but I saw how it took some time for my parents to recognize that. All of these factors contribute to this episode having its feet firmly underneath it when it comes to setting the stage. Yes, Inori is ludicrously talented for a self-taught figure skater, but everything else in the story makes perfect sense, so it's able to support that one credulity-straining element.

The art does a nice job of capturing the manga's style, and while we haven't had much chance to see how the animation will hold up with the figure skating (I'm not positive, but the opening skating sequence may have been CG), it generally does a good job of showing the movements, such as how Tsukasa's muscles engage when he's demonstrating how to move forward on skates while still indicating how awkward some of Inori's movements are. I don't love Inori's sub voice, but she also spends most of this episode either crying or on the verge of tears, so it's worth giving her a chance to stabilize as a character before deciding either way. On the whole, Medalist is off to a good start, and I'm looking forward to seeing the story play out again in a new medium.

I only have one nagging issue that keeps me from loving Medalist, but it's a big one: Of the two main characters we've been introduced to, I only like one of them. I won't pretend that Inori is a protagonist that breaks any new ground; she's the same passionate upstart in need of guidance and a self-confidence boost that we've seen in a million sports anime, with her youth being the only real distinguishing characteristic she's working with. Still, Medalist clearly knows what it's doing because it executes those tropes well enough for me to be invested in Inori's journey. Anyone desperate enough to learn to skate that they figure out a way to pay the ice-rink entrance fee in bags of worms is someone with the chutzpah to go far, in my book. Plus, I'm not immune to the nefariously manipulative tactic of making Inori an adorable-as-heck fifth grader instead of a jaded teenager or the like. You know how it goes in anime. We've got to protect her smile, and yada yada.

Tsukasa, on the other hand, is kind of a drip. The fact that he's a failed ice-dancer who once dreamt of being a pro skater himself is fine on its own, another one of those typical sports drama cliches that works pretty well when handled correctly. I'm the kind of person who probably would prefer if this character was played a bit more jaded and cynical, though. Instead, Tsukasa just comes across as a doofus. He's the kind of guy who cares enough about the rules to berate a tiny child for skirting around an entrance fee until she cries, or randomly interjects with freakouts and asides that are only there to function as broad comedic relief. It isn't that I was simply apathetic to Tsukasa's part of the story. I was actively getting annoyed by his shtick for pretty much the entire episode.

Granted, I think Medalist knows that Tsukasa is a doofus, and I'm sure that he will mature and develop once he settles into his new role as Inori's mentor. Still, it's not the best first impression that Medalist could have made, which is a shame because it's otherwise got all of the ingredients to make for a solid sports drama. The production values are generally quite good, including the blending of CG animation for some of the skating sequences, and the premiere is paced in a snappy way that keeps things moving along nicely. I don't think this is going to replace the massive Yuri!!! on Ice-shaped holes in our hearts, but it has a lot of potential. Hopefully, a part of that potential being realized means that Tsukasa will become a more tolerable deuteragonist. Poor Inori already has enough on her plate to worry about picking up the slack from her less talented co-star.