The First Slam Dunk review – thrilling­ly chore­o­graphed bas­ket­ball drama

As sum­mer stretch­es onwards, bas­ket­ball fans around the world hit the mid­point of the NBA’s tor­tur­ous­ly long off­sea­son. Thank­ful­ly, The First Slam Dunk has arrived to fill that void. Direct­ed by Take­hiko Inoue, who also wrote the 1990s man­ga on which the film is based, the film has a keen sense not only of what makes bas­ket­ball so fun to watch but also of what makes the sports dra­ma such an endur­ing cin­e­mat­ic genre.

Despite its title, The First Slam Dunk is some­thing like a finale to the 90s ani­mé, which end­ed before it could adapt the manga’s final arc which saw the pro­tag­o­nis­tic Shohoku High bas­ket­ball team com­pete in a cli­mac­tic nation­al cham­pi­onship game. You’d nev­er know this from going into the film blind. Inoue plays it more like a new begin­ning than an end­ing, inter­spers­ing the on-court action (the game takes the film’s entire run­time to play out) with flash­backs that explore the team­mates’ melo­dra­mat­ic back­sto­ries and fraught rela­tion­ships. The lead char­ac­ter, point guard Ryota, lives in the shad­ow of a deceased old­er broth­er who had more nat­ur­al bas­ket­ball tal­ent. The flash­backs unrav­el Ryota’s trou­bled home life and emo­tion­al iso­la­tion, depict­ing the com­ing-togeth­er of his team­mates as full of roil­ing ten­sion and rest­less rivalry.

Con­trary to what one might expect from the genre, the off-court dra­ma here is played with remark­able sub­tle­ty. The flash­backs con­tain an ambi­ent qui­etude that one rarely sees in sports movies; the genre typ­i­cal­ly mir­rors the explo­sive action of the games in the spec­ta­cle of inter­per­son­al con­flict. Here, the nar­ra­tive is com­mu­ni­cat­ed more through sub­dued ges­tures and impli­ca­tion, with a few star­tling inter­jec­tions of phys­i­cal violence.

It’s a tonal choice accen­tu­at­ed by the use of a tech­nique called ​“3DCG”, which uses CG ani­ma­tion to approx­i­mate the look of tra­di­tion­al 2D draw­ings. Ani­ma­tion stu­dio Toei Ani­ma­tion used the tech­nique to mixed effect in last year’s Drag­on Ball Super: Super Hero. They’ve applied it much bet­ter here, where authen­tic hand-drawn detail blends har­mo­nious­ly with 3D mod­els and cam­era moves, result­ing in a visu­al approach that can cap­ture both the sub­tlest and most bom­bas­tic gestures.

The film’s real the­atrics, of course, hap­pen on the court. The orig­i­nal man­ga was wide­ly cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing bas­ket­ball in Japan, and its ear­ly chap­ters serve as an intro­duc­to­ry course in the game’s rules to read­ers. The film, by con­trast, expects you to know the basics going in, but the on-court activ­i­ty is chore­o­graphed so thrilling­ly (and with such clar­i­ty) that even bas­ket­ball neo­phytes will get caught up in the action. Inoue cap­tures the way a ball or play­er on their way to the hoop can seem to defy grav­i­ty and hang briefly in the air with ecsta­t­ic, indul­gent slow motion. He also focus­es on lit­tle details which would be invis­i­ble in a real game, like the way moun­tain­ous cen­ter Aka­gi posi­tions his foot so he can spin around the play­er guard­ing him for a layup. I found myself wish­ing I could watch a real game direct­ed by Inoue, with such care­ful atten­tion to detail and an acute sense of drama.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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