a Japanese sports anime television series about figure skating. The series was produced by MAPPA, directed by Sayo Yamamoto and written by Mitsurō Kubo. Character design was 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, with a total of 12 episodes. A Yuri on Ice feature film, Ice Adolescence, is planned for release in 2019. 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.Released to critical acclaim, Yuri on Ice has been well received in Japan. It won three awards at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival, a Japan Character Award and seven awards in Crunchyroll's inaugural Anime Awards. 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 it for covering homo