“SK8 the Infinity” was recently released on Jan. 9, and had several anime fans anxious for its arrival. This anime was created by BONES Studios, Hiroko Utsumi, Ichiro Ohkouchi, and Michinori Chiba. What made this anime gain a lot of attention was the director Hiroko Utsumi, who worked with popular animes like “Banana Fish” and “Free!” This anime only has 12 episodes and releases a new episode every week, with episode nine being the latest.

“I decided to watch it in the first place because I saw it on social media and it looked interesting,” sophomore Linsay Sheridan said.

This anime is about Reki, a high school sophomore, and Langa, a transfer student, who became friends through skateboarding. Over time, Reki teaches Langa how to skate, and along the way, they are faced with challenging pro-skaters to “beefs” at “S,” which is a highly secret and dangerous racing course. However, as Langa gets better at skating in just a matter of months, his relationship with Reki starts to take a toll. 

“Overall, I really like this anime because the animation is gorgeous and they keep throwing plot twists in, so you don’t know what will happen next,” Sheridan said.

 The animation and the graphics of this anime are truly remarkable. There is no detail left behind, no matter what angle or perspective it is being shown from there is work put into each scene. The design of this anime matches the aesthetic of the underground city in Japan and its community. 

“My favorite thing about this anime is its animation because they pay great attention to detail,” Sheridan said.

With a limited amount of episodes, the plot moves fairly quickly but it does not leave anything out. What is even better is that background to characters and present conflicts are given in a very brief and understandable way. On a side-note, a very interesting concept of some of the characters is that they have another persona when they are skating at “S,” they separate skating and their everyday life by isolating each other. 

“The show keeps you on your toes while you watch and most of the characters are around our age so you can get a better connection to the story,” Sheridan said.

This show was also very refreshing because there are not many skateboarding animes, which makes this anime very unique and popular. The show has very good usage of skating terminologies and what the “skating world” is like. However, some parts of it were not as realistic, for example, Langa became a “pro-skater” after a couple of months of skating when it takes more time and practice than that to be good at skating. Besides that, the racing and some of the tricks are not very accurate, racing is not very common in the skateboarding community and besides the street tricks, several tricks are not even possible to do. 

“I would definitely recommend it because the show keeps you on your toes while you watch and most of the characters are around our age so you can get a better connection to the story,” Sheridan said.

Overall, the anime has amazing graphics and design, as well as having a great plot. SK8 the Infinity is enjoyable to watch, even though it has some problems with technicalities. This anime is honestly for everyone, skater or not.