Issue #288: Takehiko Inoue is getting snubbed by the Oscars for sure
Billions is back. What a surprise! To me, at least. I wasn’t following any press leading up to the premiere.
This latest season is branded “final.” None too soon. I’m impressed, they brought back Damian Lewis to reprise his role as antagonist Bobby Axelrod. Many found the previous Axe-less season anemic, but I thought it was fine. Slam Dunk takes precedence over Billions today, though I might find some time to write about the series down the line. I have a fair few notes on this week’s episode, “Tower of London.”
It’s an apt title considering filming in the UK is likely what helped them get Lewis back on board. His departure from the series was, in part, because of a lack of interest in traveling back to the United States for long periods to film. Probably worth the effort. He’s always been quite good in the show.
Anyway, on to The First Slam Dunk.
Slam Dunk: The Great Shounen Tragedy
When I saw The First Slam Dunk (2022, technically) a few weeks ago, I was very enthusiastic about the movie. That enthusiasm hasn’t faded. I find myself wanting to watch it again and still struggling to articulate what exactly made it so fantastic. On the visual level, the film is gorgeous. It is the best looking computer generated 3D anime movie ever.
Many previous attempts to utilize this style, like Netflix’s Knights of Sidonia (2014), Kengan Ashura (2019), and Baki (2018) have been sinfully ugly. They are all great works adapted from excellent manga, but they are marred by unsightly, stilted, and sometimes even grotesque 3D modeling. The First Slam Dunk is animated so brilliantly, by contrast, one might forget they are watching a 3D film. The stills rarely do the movie justice. In motion, it is masterful, correcting one of the biggest issues with 3D anime up to this point.
The First Slam Dunk is also a return to something. Like Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Zeta Gundam: A New Translation (2005) or Hideaki Anno’s Shin Evangelion (2007), Takehiko Inoue’s film alters and expands upon even what he wrote in his original manga. The novelty of his film and the titling of The First suggests that, perhaps, this version of Slam Dunk might end differently from the tragic conclusion of the manga. Great shounen work is often at its best when the battlefield of the work, whether it is a sporting competition or an actual fist fight, serves to metaphorize some more human concern. Slam Dunk (1990) always seemed to split the difference, with the extreme emotional investment of the characters in games of high school competitive basketball inspiring genuine pathos while at the same time proving to represent the movement from childhood to adulthood. The team of Shohoku aren’t winners, and they fall short of their ultimate goal of national championship victory. They don’t lose by failings in their own skill, either, but rather as a consequence of extreme injury.
In the original manga, sporting injury is a preoccupation for Inoue. Hisashi Mitsui, a supporting character, antagonizes the team because of his resentment of their ability to play. He has been sidelined due to an ACL injury that threatens to permanently compromise his mobility. Rather than pursue physical therapy and return to the team, his frustration at his recovery leads to the hostility between him and the other characters. Those characters, however, would go on to become his teammates as Mitsui overcomes his anxiety about another ACL injury. At the same time, Mitsui often falls short of the athleticism he can recall before his injury.
The conclusion is undeniable: had Mitsui stuck to his physical therapy regiment and maintained his basketball practice, he would play better in his final year of high school sports. Instead, Inoue confronts Slam Dunk readers with his human limitations he can never surpass.
Likewise, Hanamichi Sakuragi also suffers a dramatic injury in the very game depicted in The First Slam Dunk, the last game depicted in the manga. Sakuragi plays through a severe but undefined back injury that requires at least a year of rehabilitation. The film ends on the high note of Shohoku’s victory against Sannoh High, but the manga goes on to briefly gloss the subsequent losses that Shohoku suffers. Despite the fact that Sakuragi doesn’t repeat the mistakes of Mitsui and aggressively pursues rehabilitation and a post-high school basketball career, there is a great deal of ambiguity at the manga’s conclusion as to whether Sakuragi ever plays again. The physical prohibition of his ability to play is coincident with his realization that he loves the game. Inoue doesn’t depict a team of superhuman champions, but fallible, physically vulnerable children who lose when they most want to win.
The ending of the Slam Dunk manga seems to offer a bittersweet vision of coming of age. Neither Mitsui nor Sakuragi are as great as they imagined themselves to be, and they must come to terms both with the limits of their bodies and the smallness of the games they play among high school students in Japan, a nation not known for producing top basketball talent. What seems so important, winning a national championship, becomes insignificant as Sakuragi works to recover in an attempt to turn his passion into a livelihood. At the same time, there is a recognition of the minor victories of youth as foundational to one’s essence. Both Mitsui and Sakuragi risk permanent injury for a seemingly insignificant basketball victory in the regional qualifiers for a national tournament. They are not remorseful nor shown to be short sighted because of their commitment. The possibility that one can both achieve greater perspective with age and still value their adolescent memories is the one Slam Dunk opens up in its tragic end.
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if the titling of The First Slam Dunk suggests that Inoue is returning to a traumatic site in the same way as Tomino and Anno have with their respective remakes. In The First Slam Dunk, the full extent of Sakuragi’s injury remains unknown. If the film series continues, will he be able to compete in the following tournament matches? Will Shohoku win without him? What would such a revision do to the essence of the manga that casts high school memories in amber, rendering them individually significant but globally trivial? At this stage, and with no sequel announced, these questions are impossible to answer and fruitless to speculate about. Even if the outcome for Sakuragi and the team changes, The First Slam Dunk has no shortage of tragedy as it follows the basketball career of another character, Ryota Miyagi.
With this film, Inoue, like Katsuhiro Otomo, took on the challenge of adapting his own work from one medium to another. Otomo, though, at least had some experience directing film — the same year as he began Akira, 1982, he directed the live action Jiyū wo Warera ni1. Inoue, on the other hand, had no film experience until The First Slam Dunk, only working on manga serials from Slam Dunk to Vagabond (1998) to Real (1999). Two out of three are still running, though Vagabond is on indefinite hiatus and has been since 2015. In a sense, the only finished work, Slam Dunk, is made unfinished by this film that picks up at the manga’s end and animates what the television adaptation never got to. Inoue was apocryphally dissatisfied with the Slam Dunk TV anime and his lack of involvement, leading to the series’ premature conclusion. Now, with Inoue in control, the animated vision of Slam Dunk is far more severe and serious. Sakuragi has been displaced as protagonist by Ryota Miyagi, new details invented for his backstory to add depth to a formerly bit player. Miyagi is, perhaps, the least developed main character in the original series now getting his due.
As frustrating as flashbacks can sometimes be when there is a “present day” plot to progress, The First Slam Dunk is structured brilliantly to interrelate Miyagi’s childhood trauma and his need to succeed on the basketball court. After losing his father at a young age, Miyagi also lost his older brother in a fishing accident. Miyagi the elder, Sota, served both as Ryota’s basketball inspiration and tutor. Ryota labors in the shadow of his brother, constantly compared to him and even choosing to wear his same number, 7. The film has to resolve issues of Ryota navigating the question of his own individuality and indebtedness to his brother as well as his relationship with his mother, Kaoru, who has suffered immensely with the death of her husband and then, soon after, her eldest son.
Ryota says to his mother in a letter, “I wish I died instead of Sota,” a heartrending moment that also feeds into Slam Dunk’s themes regarding the significance of the achievement of these young men. Kaoru, who seems pained by watching her younger son play the sport her eldest loved, reaches a moment of catharsis watching Ryota play in the Sannoh game. Crucially, Ryota doesn’t know his mother is watching, and Kaoru never reveals it. While The First Slam Dunk gives tremendous emotional weight to a game of high school basketball, the possibility that it might be Sota and not Ryota who lived seems to indicate Ryota’s low opinion of his own achievement. He has become an excellent basketball player. But, in the end, it’s Japanese high school basketball. As an achievement in itself, it means nothing. But as an object of libidinal cathexis for the characters and their loved ones, it means everything.
The First Slam Dunk was so extraordinary and painful as a film, I’m not sure I even want to see a sequel. Mitsui has always been my favorite Slam Dunk character, the one whose story I have found the most compelling. Ryota has now gotten his day in the sun, but I can’t say I would object to a similar film from Mitsui’s perspective. Whether it covers an earlier game in the series or progresses Shohoku’s journey in a yet unknown direction, there’s probably something there. I trust Takehiko Inoue enough as an artist that any movie he has a hand in will probably be good. But, at the same time, sometimes lightning really does only strike once. The only thing worse than no more Slam Dunk would be a The Second Slam Dunk that’s terrible. Maybe he should focus on finishing Vagabond, instead.
Weekly Reading List
The Evolution Championship Series, an annual group of several fighting game tournaments, took place over the weekend of August 4th. I was an eager spectator, but I missed this discussion between Seth Killian and second place Street Fighter VI finisher, MenaRD. Killian is a great interviewer and a conversation like this should headline Evo. I would recommend this video to the fighting game curious.
Until next time.
What this movie is, or where one can watch it, is a mystery to me. I didn’t look super hard, but a cursory search reveals no information about it.