YoI - Le Monde - 09.07.2017 translation

“Yuri on Ice”, the queer figure skating anime with an unexpected success

This Japanese animated series has been the surprise success story of the last few months. We are taking the opportunity presented by Japan Expo, in which the creators participated, to focus on this sports anime unlike any other.
“Seriously, we never thought that a series about figure skating would create such enthousiasm” Olivier Fallaix is in charge of the development of Crunchyroll, an important streaming platform dedicated to anime, in France. CR is the one who’s distributing the surprise hit od the last months outside of Asia: Yuri on Ice, an only 12 episodes long anime broadcasted between last October and December, created by the small and very young studio Mappa. On his orange standa at Japan Expo, a very big convention that took place between 6-9 July at Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), “On the international level, this is our second big hit among our original works of the year, after Re-Zero.” says he stil surprised.
Above him, there is a huge board on which the main cast of the show are depicted, of which delighted teens took photos while passing. “A show about sport, which is not a really universal genre, with a big success. But the real power of Yuri on Ice is that it’s not only a sports show.” The anime tells the story of Yuri Katsuki, a young Japanese figure skater who decides to get back into competition after a series of painful defeats. His idol, Russian champion Victor Nikiforov, becomes his coach to his big surprise. Together, they participate in competitions around the world one after the other, against other skaters with very strong personalities, while their relationship becomes stronger episode after episode.

“The fans make no mistake”

36 years old Ninou Cyrico, as she calles herself, is a true fan of Yuri on Ice, which she has already watched “five or six times”. A writer and an editor in real life, she has even published an almost 200-pages fanfiction about the series: a story taking place after a couple of years after the show’s end. “The characters in Yuri on Ice are great, the story is cleverly written, with spectacular attention to detail.” she assures, underlining the care given to developing secondary characters. “Even the most insignificant ones have something that is more than simple setting. The fans make no mistake: With the fanfics and the doujins (manga created by fans), they have their own fans who writes stories about them”.

Right since October, the network of “fandoms”, fan communities, have seen Yuri on Ice suddenly take a considerable place. On tumblr, the main cast got into the most popular couple poll of 2016 at the last moment. On the fanfiction site, Archive of Our Own, no less than 19000 stories have been published by the fans.

A vast majority of these Works is about the relation between Yuri and Victor. In the anime, this love story is “implied, never explicit, is treated with discretion”, thinks Ninou Cyrico. “That’s a clever way to go about it, since that doesn’t take much of the story, which is certainly not a love story, but the come-back of Yuri.” and an ode to overcoming one’s self. And then, she stresses, “a gay love story between a Russian and a Japanese, at this time, and particularly seen from the Russian side, is very daring.”

“There is no homophobia in this series”

For Garance Le Gall, another fan of Yuri on Ice and the author of a master’s thesis on the representation of LGBT in comics, the series is “shines like a diamond in the history of anime” [literally “is like a white Stone on the calendar of anime history]

“In the West, we don’t realize the importance of what they are doing: a mainstream sports anime, which is neither yaoi nor shounen ai (genres about gay love stories), with a homosexual couple. This resembles a little bit to what George Miller did with Mad Max: Fury Road: He sold that as a movie filled with testosterone, and the viewers were faced with a feminist movie.”

In Yuri on Ice, not only the couple formed by two men is not tha main subject, but it is also considered as completely trivial by the other characters in the anime. “There is no homophobia in this series, and it’s important to see this type of narrative.”, thinks a young woman, who came to Japan Expo today wearing one of the performance costumes of Victor.

Still, a certain number of viewers stay convinced that it’s not a love story, which really gets on the nerves of the young woman: “The Westerners have a vision of love which dictates that love can’t exist without kisses, withous sex, and without ‘I love you’s on screen that they have really closed themselves to all other ways of expressing love.”

As for the the two creators of the show, who have specially come from Japan for Japan Expo, they take a relatively malicious joy in leaving uncertain this ambiguity. “Their relationship is not something we can describe with words.”, assures Mitsuro Kubo, the scenarist of the series, to Le Monde, while mentioning a “love story” which couldn’t exist if not for figure skating. “While writing, I met a skater to whom I asked if it was possible to go that far for love, and he said yes. That really set me free.” But she clearly states that: “The main goal of the anime, is to make figure skating as known as possible, it’s not for us to say how to interpret what’s going on between two characters.”

“We have worked like a painter”

Because everything is born from there: a passion for figure skating she shared with Sayo Yamamoto, the director. Until that point, there was no anime about this subject, emphasizes Olivier Fallaix. “Without a doubt, that’s because it’s really complicated to animate” he suggests. “No one has ever dared”. And the results really responds to the high expectations: The skating scenes are unanimously acclaimed, just like the realism of depiction of the professional environment.

In order to design Yuri on Ice, two women worked with professionals, starting with the ex-Japanese champion Kenji Miyamoto, who created the choreographies. Each character has his own music, on which he had to work. “We were explaining the story and the personality of the skater to him, and asking him if it was possible to add a jump here and there.”, explains Sayo Yamamoto.

“It was important for us to get a feel the personality of a character while he dances, rather than in his daily life.” It’s also because of that the team didn’t choose to work by tracing the videos of professional skaters while animating those scenes. “We rather worked like a painter: e were looking at what the person was doing and drawing what we saw”, but also what we feel.

Welcomed by Professional skaters

Fascinated by skaters like Florent Amodio, Guillaume Cizeron, Gabriella Papadakis and Morgan Cipres, the creators were inspired by some of them while creating the characters and the costumes. They remember fondly going to see Vanessa James skate, but when asked if they spoke to her, they become complete fangirls: “Nooooooo!”, they blush, like it was something impossible.

Still, Yuri on Ice was rather well-received in the world of figure skating. Three times American champion Johnny Weir, from whom the series borrowed the famous flower crown, hailed the series in numerous interviews. “There are things in this show that really reminds me of my carrier, my friends, the people around who my life was organised…” Two times world champion Evgenia Medvedeva, never stopped prasing the series, and she even took pictures while dressed-up as Yuuri.

Mitsuro Kubo and Sayo Yamamoto didn’t plan to offer a continuation to the fans. But before such a big success, “we are motivated to go further”, says Sayo Yamamoto. A feature film, about which we know nothing at the moment, has been announced.