I’ll admit, I haven’t been too enthused by a lot of anime movies in the last few years. At least the ones that make it out of Japan and into international markets in any kind of substantial way, I’ve found several of them to be a bit formulaic on plot and bland in ambition. Like every anime movie has to be about the same teenage boy and girl with slightly different haircuts engaged in a semi-fantastical adventure and romance. Even where there’s real imagination or beautiful imagery (as in recent works by Mamoru Hosoda and Makoto Shinkai), it still feels like not much new is coming out of that industry.
The First Slam Dunk may not be the most original anime movie itself, but its structure and style and absence of the usual tropes makes it a keen breath of fresh air -again, at least as far as the medium’s exported products go. And this movie was seemingly made to be exported, if can be gleaned from its heavy presence of American-coded imagery and genre conventions more typical of American sports fare than what you might otherwise see in Japan. It’s a basketball movie about an underdog high school team (where in traditional anime fashion, all the players look like they’re pushing thirty) engaged in a major championship game as their personalities and the backstory of the principal player are explored in flashback.
The film is directed by Takehiko Inoue, creator of the Slam Dunk manga it is based on, and it looks like few other anime movies in its textures and designs. There are elements of CG techniques in the work but Inoue keeps true to its hand-drawn artistic origins -starting the movie with elementary sketches of the characters appearing one by one as they approach their game, gradually gaining in colour, texture, and depth. That skeleton stays in place through the movie as the characters retain hand-drawn features through a more stylized, digitally-enhanced sheen. There’s a lot of specific detail put into movement and how the characters interact with their environments. At times it looks like the loose rotoscoping of Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10½. Other times it seems artistically reminiscent of the Spider-Verse movies -even while aesthetically it is the furthest thing from. What can’t be denied is the effect this style has on the basketball sequences.
Inoue is smart enough to keep the action on the basketball court as much as possible, partly due to its narrative significance, but also because it is the best place to showcase this thrilling animation. The basketball plays are entrancingly kinetic in a way near impossible to convey in live-action; the creativity with which Inoue inventively storyboards and shoots that action taking advantage of the geography of the space, the physicality of the characters, and the motion techniques afforded by animation -it makes for a lot of intense and captivating moments. Anime likes its big battle scenes and that is effectively what Inoue turns the basketball game into, both in how it looks and how high the stakes are for the players -and yet because of its resources and style, it has more freedom and visual spontaneity than the kind of thing you would see in an episode of Dragon Ball or Inuyasha. It’s just about enough for an audience to overlook its several flagrant violations of basketball rules.
The character drama and archetypes around the game are perhaps less compelling. You have the hotshot Sakuragi, who openly defies game rules and is not much of a team player, his antithesis the brooding Rukawa, the hulking though insecure team captain Akagi, and the troubled straight man Mitsui -who seems to have recruited Ryota, the short but fast new player whose tragic backstory involving the death of his basketball enthusiast older brother and estrangement from his mother and sister forms the backbone of the film’s emotional narrative. The movie shifts focus around between players -though only Ryota is treated with fleshed-out flashbacks- and it can be fairly arbitrary when and where. A chunk of the third act for example is devoted to Sakuragi as he suffers a back injury that weighs on him as a potential disqualification from the league. The rivalry between Akagi and a counterpart player gets significant attention. Yet the movie opens on Ryota, spends more of its time with his experiences -and regardless of some derivativeness, it’s his story that is most interesting. Inoue really hones in effectively on the lingering influence of grief on Ryota, how basketball becomes an outlet for processing it, and what it all means for his mother. This sphere of the film does at times feel short-changed though -especially in the lengthy sequences where Ryota’s perspective is not centred. None of the other players are as compelling, the movie making little effort to draw substance or history out of their personalities or relationships -their problems, entirely dealt with on the court, don’t come across so genuine.
Still, the action is wild enough that the hammy efforts at lesser drama feel supported. And the movie does hold back on things like developing a romance between Ryota and the coach’s assistant or an elaborate rivalry between him and the star player of the other team. You get the hint that these are significant aspects of the manga, but Inoue backgrounds them for the sake of the story at hand. Again, this movie cares about being accessible outside of the source’s fan base. And concentrating its efforts in the game itself and in Ryota’s relationship to it –in the process relaying some of that same drive and passion experienced by the players onto the audience. The movie still drags a bit in the end to reach the two-hour mark –the last two minutes of the game take up a solid fifteen and are full of dramatic triumphs and reversals; it’s as if the movie is trying to outdo every other basketball movie ever made. After the second time an epic climactic score is absurdly undercut by the other team suddenly matching them, it becomes a goofy joke.
When the only other movie in the animated basketball genre is seemingly Space Jam, it’s not much to suggest that The First Slam Dunk is the best of its kind. Certainly though it is a sensational pairing of form and subject, using the tools and expressive possibilities of animation to accentuate and illustrate the conventions of basketball in new and thrilling ways. In spite of its storytelling and characterization deficiencies, it is a model for the richness of animation, and closer to the kind of anime I’d like to see more often in western exhibition.
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Better than the Space Jam duology?
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