Netflix To Stream Kenji Iwaisawa’s ‘100 Meters’ Starting December 31

Netflix will close out the year with a burst of adrenaline, debuting 100 Meters, the latest feature from On-Gaku: Our Sound director Kenji Iwaisawa, on December 31. Accompanying the news, the platform has also released a new trailer highlighting the film’s grounded sports drama, razor-sharp character work, and the unmistakable handmade touch that has defined Iwaisawa’s career.

The film follows sixth-grader Togashi, a gifted runner whose effortless domination on the track falters when a determined transfer student, Komiya, challenges him. Their escalating rivalry becomes the emotional and physical engine of the story — a dynamic Iwaisawa said was central to his interest in the project.

“What I was interested in focusing on was the story of this protagonist, Togashi… a person who lost everything, who goes to the lowest of the low, and then has a comeback through real effort,” the director told Cartoon Brew in a previous interview.

For production, Iwaisawa blended hand-drawn animation and rotoscoping to visualize its intense athletic focus. While the director didn’t set out to experiment for experimentation’s sake, the production naturally evolved into a patchwork of approaches that heightened the story’s realism. One of the film’s most ambitious sequences — a rain-soaked, single-cut pan animated through rotoscoping — pushed Iwaisawa into new territory.

“The one scene that really brought a new challenge to me was the rain scene, which is near the very end of the film,” he recalled. “It was done with rotoscoping but from one single cut, where the camera pans and the racers are getting ready under the downpour. That was something I hadn’t tried before.”

100 Meters has been one of the year’s most thrilling anime features since premiering at Annecy in June, and will soon be available to audiences around the world on Netflix. If only the streamer would up Iwaisawa’s previous modern masterpiece On Goku: Our Sound.