Initial D
イニシャルD
Racing
Sports
Drama
Action
Details & Synopsis
Takumi Fujiwara delivers tofu. Every morning, before school, before the world wakes up, he drives his father's beat-up AE86 Trueno up and down Mount Akina at speeds that should be impossible for a car that old, on roads that should be impossible for anyone. He does not know he is good. He does not care. He is half-asleep and thinking about nothing.
Then the racing teams start showing up.
Based on Shuichi Shigeno's manga and produced by Studio Comet, Initial D First Stage aired on Fuji TV in 1998. Twenty-six episodes of touge street racing, mountain pass battles between purpose-built machines and one kid in a forty-horsepower hatchback who learned to drive by hauling bean curd. The CGI used for the racing sequences was primitive even by 1998 standards. It does not matter. The physics, the technique, the specific language of downhill racing, heel-toe braking, the gutter dip, the blind attack, are rendered with an obsessive authenticity that had actual car enthusiasts sitting down to watch anime for the first time in their lives.
The soundtrack is Eurobeat. This is not ironic. The Eurobeat is correct. It has always been correct.
Initial D built a fansub community that existed in parallel to the mainstream anime scene, car forums and racing enthusiasts who didn't know who Toonami was but had downloaded every episode by the time Second Stage dropped. That crossover is the story. A show that found an entirely different audience through entirely different channels and brought them into the same space everyone else was already in.
Twenty-six episodes for First Stage. Second Stage, Third Stage, Fourth Stage, Final Stage, the full arc covers Takumi's entire competitive career. Start here. You will not stop.
Then the racing teams start showing up.
Based on Shuichi Shigeno's manga and produced by Studio Comet, Initial D First Stage aired on Fuji TV in 1998. Twenty-six episodes of touge street racing, mountain pass battles between purpose-built machines and one kid in a forty-horsepower hatchback who learned to drive by hauling bean curd. The CGI used for the racing sequences was primitive even by 1998 standards. It does not matter. The physics, the technique, the specific language of downhill racing, heel-toe braking, the gutter dip, the blind attack, are rendered with an obsessive authenticity that had actual car enthusiasts sitting down to watch anime for the first time in their lives.
The soundtrack is Eurobeat. This is not ironic. The Eurobeat is correct. It has always been correct.
Initial D built a fansub community that existed in parallel to the mainstream anime scene, car forums and racing enthusiasts who didn't know who Toonami was but had downloaded every episode by the time Second Stage dropped. That crossover is the story. A show that found an entirely different audience through entirely different channels and brought them into the same space everyone else was already in.
Twenty-six episodes for First Stage. Second Stage, Third Stage, Fourth Stage, Final Stage, the full arc covers Takumi's entire competitive career. Start here. You will not stop.
Alt Title
イニシャルD
Studio
Studio Comet
Network
Fuji TV
Aired
1998
Episodes
26
Genre
Racing, Sports, Drama, Action
Status
Completed
Guides and reference pages for this series. More coming.
