Yuri on Ice

Yuri on Ice
The Cover of the first Blu-ray disc volume depicts Yuri Katsuki and Victor Nikiforov, two of the primary characters of the series, in a pose where they are embracing.
Cover of the first Blu-ray disc volume, featuring Yuri Katsuki (left) and Victor Nikiforov (right)
ユーリ!!! on ICE
GenreSports (figure skating)
Created by
Anime television series
Directed by
  • Sayo Yamamoto
  • Jun Shishido[a]
Written by
  • Sayo Yamamoto[b]
  • Mitsurō Kubo[c]
Music by
StudioMAPPA
Licensed by
Original networkTV Asahi, BS Asahi, STS, NCC, SUN, AT-X
Original run October 6, 2016 December 21, 2016
Episodes12 + OVA (List of episodes)
Manga
Yuri on Ice Side Story: Welcome to the Madness
Written byMitsurō Kubo
Published byAvex Group
PublishedMay 26, 2017
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Yuri on Ice (Japanese: ユーリ!!! on ICE, stylized as Yuri!!! on ICE) is a Japanese sports anime television series about figure skating. The series was produced by MAPPA, directed and written by Sayo Yamamoto with original scripts by Mitsurō Kubo under the chief episode direction of Jun Shishido. Character designs were handled by Tadashi Hiramatsu, and its music was composed by Taro Umebayashi and Taku Matsushiba. The figure skating was choreographed by Kenji Miyamoto, who also performed routines himself which were recorded and used as skating sound effects. The series premiered on October 6, 2016, and ended on December 22, 2016, with a total of 12 episodes. A Yuri on Ice feature film, Ice Adolescence, was originally planned for release in 2019, but has since been cancelled as of April 2024. The series revolves around the relationships between Japanese figure skater Yuri Katsuki; his idol, Russian figure-skating champion Victor Nikiforov; and up-and-coming Russian skater Yuri Plisetsky; as Yuri K. and Yuri P. take part in the Figure Skating Grand Prix, with Victor acting as coach to Yuri K.

Yuri on Ice has been well received in Japan. It won three awards at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival, a Japan Character Award, seven awards in the Crunchyroll's inaugural Anime Awards, and in 2019 was named by the website's editorial team as one of the top 25 anime of the 2010s. In Japan, the series was released in six parts on Blu-ray and DVD, with all the releases coming No. 1 on the Oricon Animation Blu-ray disc and Animation DVD disc rankings respectively. It was the eighth-most successful media franchise in Japan for 2017, had the second-highest combined Blu-ray and DVD sales of any anime in Japan for 2017, and had the highest combined sales for a TV anime that year. It was popular on social media outlets such as Tumblr, Sina Weibo and Twitter, where it received over a million more tweets than the next most-talked about anime series in the season it was broadcast. It also attracted praise from professional figure skaters, with some skaters in the 2018 Winter Olympics performing to music from the show.

Yuri on Ice has raised discussion concerning its depiction of a same-sex relationship between its protagonists, with some critics praising its depiction of anxiety, its covering of homosexuality in a way that differs from most anime and manga such as the yaoi genre, and for dealing with homosexuality in a country and sport that has present-day issues with homophobia. Others criticized its depiction for being unrealistic, and of visual censorship that arguably makes it ambiguous to some viewers.
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