First video viewable now with more to come.

Earlier this month, Major League Baseball opened its seasons with a pair of games in Tokyo between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs, two teams that feature a number of Japanese players on their rosters. To celebrate, a short anime video was created by Ufotable, the studio behind Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, but it turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg of the collaboration between Japanese animation artists and the North American professional baseball league.

MLB has just unveiled Heroes of the Game, an MLB anime video, and is promising more to come. Not just an animated video cribbing from the visual playbook of influential hit anime series, Heroes of the Game was animated by artists whose resumes include such landmark series as One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist, and as an added bonus, MLB says that everything in the video was hand-drawn.

Obviously, you’re not going to make a professional baseball anime without featuring Shohei Ohtani, and the two-way superstar is the first individual to get the spotlight, with the video’s narrator describing him as “the one who has mastered both sides of the game.”

As we see Shohei rocket a ball into the stratosphere, we get a taste of the talents of Hiroshi Shimizu, who’s in the director’s chair for Heroes of the Game. An anime industry veteran with decades of experience, Shimizu has served as animation director for multiple One Piece and Doraemon theatrical features, and his key animator credits include My Hero Academia, Studio Ghibli’s Pom Poko, and sports TV anime series Yawara and Yuri on Ice.

There’s more anime bombast as we watch the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Paul Skenes (“the pitcher with ferocious power to unleash”) hurl a fastball with such force that it embeds itself in a concrete wall like it’s someone who just took a knockout punch in a Masami Obari fight sequence. Aaron Judge (“the herculean hitter on a mission to become one of the all-time greats”) takes on a subterranean titan as the two forego balls altogether and swing their bats at each other with arguably murderous intent, and Juan Soto (“the man who sees all and can change the game with just one swing”) fires up his analytical skills in the middle of a crowd.

▼ Additional anime player portraits appear on the Heroes of the Game page on the official MLB website.


The video closes with some accompanying vocals from J-pop/anime theme song vocalist Ado and a final shot featuring more than a dozen other MLB players seen from behind, and MLB says to “Stay tuned for more content and surprises celebrating our Heroes of the Game,” hinting that other players will be appearing in anime form in future videos, and ESPN

Source: MLB
Top image: MLB
Insert images: YouTube/MLB, MLB
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