Student athlete Tadano Kenji is crushed by the reality of being too short to chase professional baseball, but his aging coach recommends an alternate path: Japan’s professional hydroplane speedboat racing league called Kyotei, or BOAT RACE. Soon he enrolls in the BOAT RACE training school, where he starts to develop his general racing skills and a challenging weight compensation maneuver, the “Monkey Turn”. The series follows Kenji’s rise to the top amongst a heat of other colorful racers.

Monkey Turn and its sequel series depict nearly all the various courses and schools associated with Kyotei boat racing in early 2000s bad CG. Some rail stations and landmarks are also shown, but rather sparingly, with the focus clearly on the sport and its stadiums. The extras of sequel series Monkey Turn V‘s DVD set included some live-action footage of the different race venues and some CG environment panning shots.

As the anime mostly avoids the pitfalls that come with gambling, it should be made clear that Monkey Turn‘s adaptation was pretty much directly supported by the BOAT RACE Promotion Association, which sells its sport as a parimutuel betting game on par in terms of popularity in Japan to horse racing.With this perspective, it comes as no surprise that Monkey Turn‘s final sliver of relevance lies in the world of pachislot games which use scenes from the anime.