STEEL BALL RUN JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

Episodes 1-4

Okay, let's start by addressing the elephant (not Tusk) in the room: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run's ending animation song, “Shinu ka Ikiru ka / Dead or Alive” by Yūki Chiba, is bad. Beyond the song's use of sampled horse sounds making it difficult to listen to in a vacuum, having the ED set to a new track from a Japanese rapper breaks the franchise's longstanding tradition of using licensed tracks from global artists. This tradition helped reinforce how global culture, and especially music, is a foundational inspiration for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and feels especially misplaced here, as so much of Steel Ball Run is overtly about especially American sentiments around patriotism, entitlement to grandeur, and patriarchy.

To rub salt in the wound, this track was apparently produced by Dr. Luke, Łukasz Sebastian Gottwald, who was taken to court by the musician Kesha for sexual harassment and forced her to continue to work with him and his label, Kemosabe Records, while those legal proceedings were ongoing. This song and the circumstances that led to its production are nothing short of a blemish on this historic franchise. I fully believe that this ending was originally intended to be set to Fleetwood Mac's “The Chain,” and that is the only version of this ending I care to engage with.

All of that being said, I think the reason there's been so much discourse around Steel Ball Run's ending animation is because the anime is otherwise entirely unimpeachable. Between the voice acting, some of the best damn horse animation I've ever seen, and the masterful rewrites to the original manga to make the story flow better in the medium of animation, this is easily one of the best anime to come out this year and the new standard for how to adapt a written work into a televised one. I've read the Steel Ball Run manga at least three separate times over the past decade, and I cannot believe how much the anime manages to surprise and impress me even as I know exactly what's going to happen next.

If I had to elevate one criticism that's not likely the consequence of Warner Music Japan wanting to use JoJo's popularity to bolster an artist they're heavily betting on, it's that the fight with Oyecomova feels a bit underwhelming compared to the fights against Kria and Killer Queen in part four Diamond is Unbreakable. Though, this is more likely just a consequence of how great the fight against the Boom Boom family was in previous episodes. The escalation of Andrew Boom Boom being a weird little, auto-erotic asphyxiating freak to him and his being an existential threat to Johnny and Gyro is some of the best “villain of the week” writing in the entire series. Similarly, the English dub does a great job of making each member of the Boom Boom family feel like a weird hillbilly, while also grounding them in familial and patriarchal dynamics that will only be more present in this story as it goes on.

As we head into episode five, I'm so curious about how the anime will start expressing Gyro's backstory and his relationship with his father. While sprinkled throughout the events thus far in the manga, the anime removed these flashbacks for the sake of pacing around more immediate story events and fights. Hopefully, in episode five, as Gyro and Johnny gather up the Zombie Horse macguffin and we begin to get a sense of the broader machinations surrounding the Steel Ball Run race, we also learn more about Gyro and his motivations. While Gyro and Johnny's journey to becoming super best friends is just as fun to experience in the anime as it is in the manga, Gyro getting cagey about Johnny exploring his past is starting to get a bit old in the anime without the work establishing why that'd be a sensitive subject for the mysterious man.

Blemishes aside, Steel Ball Run continues to be excellent, and I'm so glad that JoJo Fridays can once again be a psychologically load-bearing part of my week.

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With JoJo's Bizarre Adventure playing no small part in his bisexual awakening, Lucas DeRuyter is thrilled to be reviewing the latest anime adaptation of a work that is nothing short of foundational to who he is in his adult life today. You can catch glimpses of his own bizarre adventures on his Bluesky account and read about how these exploits have informed his taste in media and his broader worldview by checking out his portfolio. He and his JoBros catch up at least once a week in ANN's This Week in Anime column, where they have big, but appropriate, reactions to everything going on in this bizarre industry.

STEEL BALL RUN JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is currently streaming on Netflix.