the first slam dunk is the best movie of the year and it’s not even close
or how i’m writing about a movie that actually made me jump out of my seat in the theater
This year has been real good for me in pretty much exactly one lane — I’ve experienced some good ass media this year. Like, a lot of phenomenal media. So if you’ll humor me, I’m gonna just really quick do a giant list of notable standouts I can remember seeing in a theater or with friends. Because in a year that has resolutely kicked my ass up and down the street with no end in sight so far, I’m gonna at least start this whole thing off this way.
- Shin Ultraman (the best shin movie, don’t @ me. M87 is a killer theme - Watch Ultraman Blazar btw :] it’s currently airing and free on YouTube)
- Skinamarink (probably my favorite horror movie now, adore the razor-sharp tension)
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (really great!)
- RRR (this shit is just devil may cry 3 and it’s HYPE AS HELL WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)
- A Goofy Movie (i made a mistake waiting this long in my life to see it)
- Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (i made a mistake watching this with the homies)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (it was just nice having a good solid adventure film that understands the assignment and gets a solid B+ for it)
- The Super Mario Bros. Movie (somehow had the most peak rider kick in a year with shin kamen rider)
- Satantango (haunting, ethereal, brutal. if you can’t stomach the idea of a seven hour long movie (one that has no qualms being incredibly upsetting for 40+ minute segments), do what i did with my friends and watch it over three nights in chunks since the blu-ray release splits it into three parts. had the chance to be my favorite movie ever.)
- Knights of the Zodiac (i’ve never seen saint seiya and this was a fun time! if i had seen it, I’d be very mad or sad!)
- Shin Kamen Rider (thankfully better than the Mario movie in every regard. the backflip.)
- Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (you really had to be made under crunch because damn, this was a contender for best of the year.)
- Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (please let fun adventure films come back in a major way, i saw this one twice in theaters because of how much fun it was)
- Oppenheimer (a good movie that couldn’t actually get me to care about its goings-on, honestly the weakest new release I saw this year, sue me.)
- Barbie (#barbiesweep, saw it twice in theaters (once at a drive-in!) and it made me cry both times. good movie)
- TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (wow just a good ass movie here, go see it)
- Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (if every marvel movie was this good, we wouldn’t have superhero fatigue)
- Strays (heinous, worthless, nothing of value here. a disgusting film.)
- Five Nights At Freddy’s (average, that’s really it)
Now it’s almost November and so far, I’ve seen like 25 movies from this year! All of them ranging in quality as well. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but these were the big ones to stick out in my head. It’s been a real relief to reunite with movies ever since I got out of a funk and started watching them again in a major way last year. It’s also given me an avenue to look back at the last ten years and see how my tastes have changed over time!
This goes beyond just film, just so y’know. 2022 was the beginning, but 2023 really has been the great groundshaker of Aaron’s Established Favorites Of All Time. Last year, Inland Empire dethroned a decade long reign of Seven Samurai in the glamorous seat of “Favorite Movie”.
By god it happened again because The First Slam Dunk is the best movie of the year and it’s not even a contest. It is my favorite movie bar none. I cannot stop thinking about it. It made me sit on the edge of my seat in the theater, jump out of it, pump my fist and (if it wasn’t for the very nice person, who was also the only other person in the screening, in front of the three of us who went to see it) would have made me scream a very guttral “LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”.
I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a movie ever in my entire LIFE. I’ve legitimately never sat on the edge of my seat in a movie theater before because of how riveted I was to what I was seeing. I can’t shut up about this movie, and now I’m going to go off on it. Please see this as soon as the opportunity arises.
im not joking, ive been going feral please send help
Now that I’ve done all of that, I suppose I should talk about the thing, huh. I always find it difficult to properly get started on any subject at hand, because the last thing I want to do is some academic sounding “The First Slam Dunk is a 2022 movie directed by…” Wikipedia soundin ass intro, but if you were like me, this is might be your first bit of exposure to Slam Dunk as a whole.
And if you are like me, you’ve probably heard in passing about Slam Dunk in the past. It’s mega popular. 7th best selling manga ever popular. There’s a scholarship named for the series that sends players to study the sport in America popular. Unfortunately,I never got around to reading it as a kid since I used to utilize the most out of the MnLINK GATEWAY for volumes of Claymore and Shaman King from Rochester Public library. Didn’t really want to anyway.
You gotta understand, I never liked sports growing up. I’m disabled, sports reminded me of my dumb stupid garbage joints, I was in a school system that routinely went to state tournaments for football and wrestling and won so I was inundated with the stuff. So even if I did hear about a basketball manga, I probably would have skipped out. Sports were mad stupid to me and I didn’t like them. Dumb in hindsight, but what can you do?
Anyway, Slam Dunk. You actually, genuinely don’t need to have read the manga or watched the anime adaptation of the series to see The First Slam Dunk. Mainly it focuses majorly on a completely separate character than this goofy redhead delinquent turned athlete.
Above is our beloved dorkass, Hanamichi Sakuragi. Quick synopsis — this guy gets rejected 50 times by 50 different girls. Tough luck. He sees another cute girl, gets smitten. She asks if he likes basketball, he says I LOVE IT. He has never dribbled in his life. Hijinks ensue.
I am not qualified to talk about Slam Dunk proper, so that’s all you get. Go read it if you want. If it’s as good as this movie, then it’ll be perfect. Like I said though, he’s not our main character for the movie. The story instead takes the opportunity to flesh out one of the side characters and tell a truly compelling story of grief, loss, and mourning— that being centered on Miyagi Ryota.
he’s the best, i cannot get over it.
Ryota’s entire backstory is the emotional core of the movie and it’s done in such a way that made me cry several times the first time I saw it. It’s not even just the emotional core, him growing up and experiencing loss is literally how the film is structured — Between flashbacks to his childhood is the Big Tournament Match that the underdog team is playing in.
I’m gonna try really hard to be vague about any major moments or specific story beats because unfortunately, as of writing, the film is not available in any legal avenue. GKids had a North American run in theaters for about a week since it dropped after Barbenheimer, and we only just received word that the home release in Japan is coming in February of 2024.
Which is a shame, because the guts of how this thing is constructed is great. It really worked for me. The movie just effortlessly bobs and weaves from past to present in a way that makes such a big impact. These flashbacks all start when Ryo is just this young boy playing with his brother who he’ll soon lose to an accident at sea and catches up to the current day right up to, honestly, the scene that made me jump out of my goddamn seat.
Ryota and his family’s coping mechanisms are shown on full display to some genuinely upsetting sequences. Like, if you told me the anime basketball movie would throw some nuclear haymakers into my heart, I wouldn’t necessarily believe you! But The First Slam Dunk does it anyway, and my jaw hit the floor at the kind of subject matter it was willing to discuss. Perseverance through dark, incredibly hard times is one of the biggest themes on display here and it’s all done with such a deft, purposeful hand.
What’s also remarkable, for much of this movie focuses on Ryo’s emotional turmoil and childhood, is that The First Slam Dunk really makes sure to give time to every other character on the team. It gives space for Akagi the team captain to show unease and insecurity of being enough for his team. For Mitsui, it’s his uneasy relationship with Ryota and their rivalry that drives him shown through flashback. It lets us see the energy of Rukawa, his ego and desire to be number #1 be broken down in order for him to rally his team when they need it most. Sakuragi also gets the most time devoted to him next to Ryota so that the big climatic moments of the manga still hit the way they need to for newcomers through an extended sequence that very quickly recaps his journey up to this point.
Also noteworthy is actually giving us time to explore the other team, Sannoh, and their desires so we can see the contrast with Shohoku (the school that our ragamuffins play for). We get moments that firmly establish the Sannoh players as these titans that seem impossible to fell in the same space that show off what our team wants and how they’ll fight tooth and nail to beat such impossible odds. The direct contrast helps keep the energy up at a maximum during the actual match, which I realize I haven’t really talked about at all.
I’m not a basketball fan and know very little about it, but I was absolutely enraptured by the back and forth of this match. Every rebound, every three pointer, every crash, foul, hard hit and breakthrough is perfectly paced for maximum effect. The impact of some of these shots is emphasized so well by the size of the characters in the frame but also by how pretty this movie can actually be.
The visuals are out of this world. The art direction does such a good job of translating the art style that the manga and its author, Takehiko Inoue, is known into 3D. It’s all staged like a manga as well, translated to film with these direct clear pauses in motion that make it look like his panels were ripped directly out of Weekly Shonen Jump and given the motion you had to infer in your mind.
That should be a given however, since the director and writer is also Takehiko Inoue. First time too, by the way. This is a real Akira situation because the dude making the movie also made the source material and knows exactly what (and how) to translate his most popular work into animation. Forgive me for the sudden screendump, I just need to show this movie off beyond just trailer footage.
The translation from the page to the silver screen was done in such a fantastic manner that it makes me truly want to see more CG anime if it were given the time (and budget, budget matters a lot here) to maintain a specific stylization and art direction that would mask any imperfections. I’m not gonna act like 2D animation is inherently better or anything, but I think we would be a whole lot more open to 3D if stuff looked anywhere near as good as this movie.
The soundtrack is also just phenomenal. Satoshi Takebe and 10-FEET do a vast majority of the music together (with an opening by The Birthday) and boy oh boy does it do the trick. It’s used in the exact perfect way every single time it’s being utilized.
Actually, I want to point out here what that the soundtrack does. There’s two natures to the story and everything works to contrast the two. Takebe’s additions to the soundtrack tend to be soft, tender, melancholy to score our drama while the 10-FEET tracks are explosive, loud, powerful to show the intensity of the action. Because of this, the movie really likes to hit you with something real, our characters at their lowest moments, and pull you back with an excruciating high to remind you that nothing is so bad that you can’t come back from it — all accented and heightened by the soundtrack.
It’s also the knowledge to know when not to use music that elevates the audio to another level. There are several moments where the audio goes completely quiet to let the sheer grief of Ryo come out unadultered. You’re just watching this kid grieve over his brother, crying his poor heart out in the secret place they shared and there’s no cheesy soundtrack, nothing but him screaming and crying so hard his eyes are forced open.
or it’s just a ticking stopwatch going faster and faster and the timer is counting down to zero with no time to spare and the breathing is getting heavier and heavier. a timeout is blocked, and the clock isn’t stopping. everything is in extreme slow mo until panic ensues, the last desperate plays to make or break everything.
feet thump against panels, seven seconds left. color is draining from everything as your senses get overwhelmed by the intensity. you feel yourself, in your chair at home or in the cinema, unable to breath as the color washes away to black and white there’s nothing we can do all is lost.
you linger in that space, you see that there’s no way forward, your throat gives out entirely as the movie takes a complete, domineering command over how it wants to make you feel. it rewards you with one thing.
color. this isn’t so much a moment for us first timers but for the people who never got to see this moment animated. see, the slam dunk anime never got to this arc. they never got to see shohoku vs sannoh play out on any screen, they only had the manga to go back to for such majesty. no matter what your relationship is to slam dunk, this moment still reigns supreme. The final shot of the game occurs right at 0.1 seconds remaining. The clock ticks to 0.0.
There’s no more audio. The theater is silent as you watch the ball sail through the hoop. The underdogs won. Everyone and everything is still silent as reality sets in. You’re held in that moment for one whole minute until the two rivals of the series approach each other. Face off one last time. And then.
Stirring strings as the two realize they not only worked together at last, but are truly teammates. It’s a payoff to people who waited close to 30 years for this moment to be realized in animation, it’s a payoff to a nailbiter of a game, and it’s the last grand hoorah to the sport.
And it gives way to gratitude, celebration, joy, and peace. The characters finally get the closure they deserve and need, not forgetting the past and carrying its memory on for those who cannot walk with us any longer. I let myself get carried away in the whirlwind of emotions and I’m so glad I did. It’s genuinely one of the few movies I’ve seen where if it wasn’t for external factors, like getting a ride to the theater, I would have walked straight back to the box office for the next showing. I saw it a few nights later anyway and it’s been burned into my synapses ever since then.
The First Slam Dunk is a fully cohesive, smartly directed, intensely powerful movie and there hasn’t been anything like it so far this decade. It’s such a singularly powerful success that should be the reason why new people get into the sport. All good sports anime makes you understand why people love these sports, why they’re willing to go through all the effort, the pain, the sacrifice, the trials and tribulations for the thing they love.
The First Slam Dunk is the best movie I’ve seen and that’s all I gotta say about it.
hi that’s it from me. you can find me on twitter @ aaroncurrydish, on twitch @ acurrydish, bluesky @ acurrydish and other places. if you enjoyed this and feel like throwing me a dollar or two, paypal is the way to go, don’t feel obligated though. next up on the docket is a big one so i hope i can get it out soon.
