The First Slam Dunk

95 One word for this movie, parallels, thats it, this movies ability to create incredible parallels is next level and I believe on par with Blue Giant and with 2 more characters at that. I’ll get back to those but first i’ll talk about some other stuff, the characters are great, our main character, while not heavily focused throughout easily shines the brightest here with a great origin story, some hard hitting yet inspirational emotions, and utterly amazing development. After they hit us early with Sota they did a great job building him back up and again and again during the game. As for the rest of the team, it is one of the most well made fleshing out of side characters I have ever seen, they give each of them a ton of subtext and background so you can learn to grow with them and understand them, I especially liked The red heads inner monologues and final sendoff because they shower the harsh reality most ball players face in their early days. Don’t get me wrong though, each and every player on the team was picked apart to clinical precision. Even an opposing player had some background, this was great because along with the ending they fave the enemy team some real personality instead of giving them a more Monstars treatment. The dialogue and character interactions are also super well done, the players have very realistic chemistry and have even better origin stories when talking about Mitsui and Ryota. Ok now back to the parallels, they are honestly like nothint I’ve seen before, the perfectly time switching to the grounded and realized inner monologues, to the reaching into each one of their souls to pull through just to win this game, the way this movie portrays the journey of human emotions and talent is almost transcendent, and especially great in a sports movie which usually are not my speed. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how extremely good these parallels are, absolutely the heart of this movie and make it what it is. Now to the play by play game, and it is just about as action packed and thrilling a ball game can get, multiple score changes and momentum changes make for a super entertaining game, you’d think with the amazing things that happen away from the game, the actual basketball scenes would seem stale but you’d be fucking wrong, they rock and are so fun. There is virtually nothing to critique about this film, throughout the movie I was nitpicking that I wasn’t getting too attached to Ryota and his feelings but I realized his story is less of a tear jerker and more of an amp story to get you to run through a wall and it sure as hell succeeded at that. And the animation is of course beautiful, some love to hate on cgi in traditionally animated movie but I love it here, gives so much more life and character to it, as well as all the pencil style background and introductions, it was great. All around easily the best sports movie I have ever seen but if you just call this a basketball movie you are seriously disrespecting it.  This movie is really just an experience like no other, for two hours you are transported into this game and cannot wait to see what happens at the end.  I read up a little on this and discovered there is an old manga series on these characters and while I could have known more about them, I think I am glad to go in blind and learn about these characters for the first time as they are alive and moving. I cannot give it a flawless 100 just yet, I need to let it sink in personally for me to see if it holds up. Okay, unfortunate update here but I think a high 4.5 feels better, while it has very, very little issues it doesn’t speak to me or move me the way the rest of the 5 stars do.