The First Slam Dunk (2022)

The First Slam Dunk arrives with a reputation and a trophy case, and it earns both without much fuss. Takehiko Inoue directs his own manga to its conclusion, following point guard Ryota Miyagi through the Inter-High national championship against the reigning champions of Sannoh Kogyo. The basketball is rendered with a hybrid of 3D computer imagery and hand-drawn animation that gives the game weight and speed. The camera finds angles a live-action crew would envy. It is, by any reasonable measure, a very good basketball movie.

What the film concerns itself with is grief. Ryota carries a dead brother, Sota, whose love of the sport became Ryota's own, and the flashbacks thread that loss through every possession. The themes are perseverance, family, the private pain a teenager hides behind composure. These are old concerns, human ones, and the film treats them plainly. There is no lecture waiting at the end of the third act. No character turns to the camera to explain what the audience should feel about the world. The movie wants us to care about a jump shot, and it succeeds.

For the purposes of this ledger, the film is a null result. The cast is entirely Japanese, and no comment is made about that fact. There are no LGBTQ themes, no feminist argument, no racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body positivity, no neurodivergence, no revision of history. The messaging, such as it is, amounts to the proposition that hard work and a willingness to endure can carry a person through. A clean sheet. We do not see many of these anymore, and there is something almost restful about it.