This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it. Storywise, it feels a little like walking into a play halfway through – which in effect you are, unless you’ve followed Haruichi Furudate’s huge-selling, long-running manga, from which this is adapted, and the 85 episodes of TV anime it’s already spawned. Even the title will be indecipherable to newcomers: “haikyuu” is Japanese for volleyball; the “dumpster battle” refers to our two rival high school teams and their urban-wildlife mascots, a crow and a cat.
With very little preamble we’re thrown straight into a high-stakes match between these teams – a third-round playoff in Spring National tournament – and that’s where we stay for the duration. There are occasional flashbacks illuminating relationships between some of the players, not least our central rivals: hyperactive Shôyô Hinata, who’s super-fanatical about the sport and overcomes his short stature with his powerful jumping abilities; and cool, angsty Kenma Kozume, who appears to be existentially indifferent to everything, including volleyball, despite being a master tactician at it.
The animation is more your standard commercial product than Studio Ghibli-level fine art; stylised, often perfunctory and rough around the edges, but amped up with graphics, extreme closeups and super slo-mo shots of boys hanging in mid-air for eternity before smashing the ball across the net with all their might. If you’re up for it, the level of this story’s commitment to the minutiae of volleyball – the play-by-play tactics, the strategies, the rituals – is admirable. And part of the franchise’s appeal is clearly how teenage boys’ anxieties, emotions and relationships can be sublimated through sport (there are no female characters to speak of here). But for the uninitiated, you might as well be a cat or a crow watching this: much of it will leave you cold or simply go over your head.
• Haikyu!!: The Dumpster Battle is out in Australia on 30 May, and in the US and UK on 31 May.
