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Quick Recommendation #8: Initial D

Drifting Anime, That Drips With Style

I’m not the biggest car-guy, even though I do enjoy a bit of car-YouTube from time to time.1 But I just love the anime Initial D.

The cover of the first issue of the manga. A teenager stands infront of his white Toyota Corolla.

The cars they drive remind me of my first real racing game: Gran Turismo on the first Playstation. And it has cemented owning a car with pop-up headlights on my bucket list.

The show has lots of intense racing scenes, backed up by an insane eurobeat soundtrack. Trust me – it works.

Here’s the basic setting:

Takumi Fujiwara is a teenager that works part-time for his father’s Tofu shop – making deliveries in the early morning. His father, Bunta, is an old street racer, and while Takumi hasn’t inherited his interest, he has inherited his talent. And being a lazy teenager, who wants to get done quickly with his work, he simply started driving faster and faster.

He drives an old, but well-tuned, Toyota Corolla – and him getting laughed at for driving a car like that, with the name of the tofu shop on the side, is part of the charm.

Takumi's car, a plain-looking AE86.

How to watch

Here’s the order:

  • Initial D (referred to retroactively as First Stage): 26 episodes (1998)
  • Initial D Second Stage: 13 episodes (1999)
  • Initial D Extra Stage: 2-episode OVA side-story focusing on Impact Blue (2000)
  • Initial D Third Stage: a 104-minute movie (2001)
  • Initial D Fourth Stage: 24 episodes (2004–2006)
  • Initial D Extra Stage 2: a 50-minute OVA side-story focusing on Mako and Iketani (2008)
  • Initial D Fifth Stage: 14 episodes (2012–2013)
  • Initial D Final Stage: 4 episodes (2014)

In general, I prefer the original Japanese, and not the English dub. However, when watching while doing other stuff, it’s easier when I understand the language spoken, heh. So I jump between the two.

The English dub is available on Crunchy Roll – but for some annoying reason, I can’t set it to Japanese. However, most of the show appears to be available on YouTube – like here and here.

A yellow Mazda RX-7 FD.
Keisuke Takahashi drives my favourite car from Gran Turismo: the Mazda RX-7.

If you at least have a passing interest in cars, I highly recommend giving the first few episodes a try!

  1. A recommendation here, for light-hearted reviews, is Throttle House. ↩︎