Haikyuu!!: The Dumpster Battle review – huge anime hit goes deep into high school volleyball

Obsessively detailed clash between two rival high school teams has done massive box office in Japan, but it won’t make much sense to the uninitiated

This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it. Storywise, it feels a little like walking into a play halfway through – which in effect you are, unless you’ve followed Haruichi Furudate’s huge-selling, long-running manga, from which this is adapted, and the 85 episodes of TV anime it’s already spawned. Even the title will be indecipherable to newcomers: “haikyuu” is Japanese for volleyball; the “dumpster battle” refers to our two rival high school teams and their urban-wildlife mascots, a crow and a cat.

With very little preamble we’re thrown straight into a high-stakes match between these teams – a third-round playoff in Spring National tournament – and that’s where we stay for the duration. There are occasional flashbacks illuminating relationships between some of the players, not least our central rivals: hyperactive Shôyô Hinata, who’s super-fanatical about the sport and overcomes his short stature with his powerful jumping abilities; and cool, angsty Kenma Kozume, who appears to be existentially indifferent to everything, including volleyball, despite being a master tactician at it.

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