Review of Haikyu!! Movie: The Dumpster Battle

7/10. This movie leaves you wanting more. As a sequel to the show, there are a little bit of everything that made this show great. The action was phenomenal and the animation carried the fluidity of the match so it was easy to follow. The music gave chills to the spine as Hinata jumps to spike the ball. Everything was done masterfully as you'd expect from a movie. The problem was the movie run time. When I saw the runtime being 85 minutes, I knew this was going to be a problem. With episodes being (for the sake of simplicity) roughly 20 mins long, this movie triesto conclude a match with 4.5 episodes which is simply not enough.

Many plays get overlooked or simply touched upon before moving on. There was very little time to process the significance of a play outside of the very big ones. Many players were given one liners otherwise you would never know they were playing.

Overall, the stakes of the match felt lost to the time provided. Instead, we got a movie that focused more on character development (mostly on the rival's side) and the match was simply the backdrop.

The directors wanted to make a movie, fine. They wanted us to pay, fine. But cutting out material to fit into a 90 minute movie was not the way to go.