Review of Haikyu!! Movie: The Dumpster Battle

It's almost everything I wanted from the match up between Karasano and Nekoma. But it's a movie instead of a season of anime, and you can FEEL the squish of the pacing in it and I just don't see a lot of elevated production to compensate for it. This is as good as Haikyuu "To the Top" in terms of animation and sound design. If it's better in any of those regards it's so minor that it's not worth giving additional praise for. However the fact that this movie's runtime would barely cover 4 episodes of the anime if it were still in seasonal animeform, means that it just feels like a slightly underwhelming conclusion for all of the build up we've had between these schools and these characters over the course of the series. The match vs Shiratorizawa felt more intense and emotional than this one did, and maybe it felt that way in the manga also (I'm anime only) but something tells me that this has to do with the fact that the match was so much shorter.

This is definitely a mixed bag of emotions for me. On the one hand I absolutely loved the movie, it lived up to the now very high standards I have for this series. It got me feeling all kinds of feels for these characters, and this match in particular felt different emotionally due to the close bond these two rival schools have developed with one another.

It just feels like it's over too soon and that it's missing some things. I don't want to feel like that at the end of the day, because up till now absolutely nothing in this series has left me feeling any kind of disappointment like this.

8/10