The theatrical anime Hyakueme. (100 Meters) premiered exclusively worldwide on Netflix on Wednesday, December 31, 2025. The visuals are stunning, of course, but the music—the score—playing underneath shook me to my core.
It's not just cool. I had this realization—“Wait, isn't this music the very theme of the work itself?”—so let me gush about that for a moment.
A Whole Lifetime Packed Into Just 10 Seconds
The sprinters in this story live for the mere “10 seconds” it takes to run 100 meters. Past glory, present suffering, their obsession with the future—they slam all of it into that single instant.
Listening to the score, I got the sense that the very structure of the music becomes those “10 seconds that distill a life.”
It begins in the taut silence before the start, explodes all at once at the gun, and builds to a fever pitch toward the finish line. Each piece feels like being shown the highlight reel of their lives, and just listening sends my heart rate climbing.
The Track as the “Chords,” the Runners as the “Improvisation”
And here's the point that personally made me gasp the hardest… Don't you think the music in this work is incredibly “jazzy”?
Here's how it struck me as I listened:
- The running track = the “chord progression”
- The runners = the “improvised solos”
In jazz, musicians freely riff and improvise over a fixed chord progression—the rules. Track and field is the same: there's an absolute rule (the track)—“100 meters, straight line, don't step out of your lane.” And over that rule, those instruments called runners play their sound (their running) wildly, in their own styles, as if the rules were no concern at all.
At first it sounds scattered, like a free-for-all improvisation, but it all holds together on the foundation of the “track.”
That razor-thin balance felt like it embodied “a competition between the runners, and a one-time-only jam session,” and it gave me goosebumps.
The film's finale—the Japanese National Championships, the men's 100-meter final—is made up of nothing but sound effects and the runners' breathing. It stands in contrast to all the races before it, and this, too, served as silent BGM that drove home the theme of the work.
The Music Is Running, Too
That score isn't just background music—it feels like it's running right alongside Togashi and Komiya on the other side of the screen.
If you're about to watch it a second or third time, please prick up your ears for the music, too. The moment you think “Ah, they're having a session right now,” the heat of the race should sound twice as intense. Etched into it, more eloquent than any words, you'll find the sprinters' cries from the soul.
Image from the Netflix Japan X account
