Review of Haikyu!! Movie: The Dumpster Battle

Overall pretty good, but an oddly mixed bag. This will just be bullet points: It's the effective runtime of 4 episodes, which means this makes for an unusually short match considering its importance for a big portion of the show's characters. Given that they still budget a lot of time for player background stories, the whole thing ends up quite rushed. The animation is rather inconsistent. We get a bunch of really nice longer flowing fully animated play sequences, but also quite a few, mostly non-action, that look like the interns did them. There's oddly little character flavor. They focus quite heavily on a few players andthe other characters almost disappear. I was like halfway through and started wondering if they even got the actual voice actors for some of the guys, Kageyama and Tanaka included. They take a distant backseat in this one.

Haikyuu loves building towards epic emotional match moments by showing you past comments or lessons leading into a moment. They dial it up in this one while also doing a noticeably worse job of it. It simply doesn't work as well as we're used to from the show, and for the first time I found myself wanting them to just get on with it instead.

It says I.G. on the box, but my guess would honestly have been that a new studio did this. The vibe was very different and so were the priorities. It felt oddly off, but it's still very much worth watching.