«The First Slam Dunk», all the records of the Japanese manga on basketball that beat «Avatar» and is liked by the boys of Generation Z- Corriere.it

It is not obvious that the millennials overwhelmed in childhood by the tidal wave of Japanese cartoonsfrom Holly and Benji to Dragon Ballknow the difference between a manga it's a souls. Simply said: manga indicate comic stories, anime animated films. The root of the two strands is Japanese, while the development looks to the West, to the great adventure novels, in a narrative hybrid inspired by American coming-of-age stories, with young people looking for redemption or a place in the world, perhaps in a sporting setting. Having clarified the genre, the numbers would be enough to define the specific weight of Slam dunk, one of the manga most loved, cut on the world of basketball, with an eye to the battles of the NBA and the spirit of affirmation of oriental young men who came from nowhere to assert themselves. From that comic-influencer, published in Italy by Panini Comics, here is the film of records, the anime The First Slam Dunkdirected by the manga author himself, Takehiko Inoue, born in 1967, which swept the Tokyo box office Avatar 2: The Water Way, registering 8.5 million spectators for a collection of over 12 billion yen, equal to 85 million eurosand thus positioning itself among the top thirty box office hits in Japanese history.

Produced by Toei Animation, The First Slam Duke
arrives in theaters, branded Anime Factory, as a special event on May 10 in the original language and from May 11 in a dubbed version. From comics to films, Inoue modifies, updates, revises, claiming to have inserted new suggestions into the well-known model. The added value lies in the dynamism of the story, in a style that alternates the heated phases of the match, the "match of life", with the flashback path that each of the protagonists has made to be there, on the parquet, playing for the future. Playmaker and pivot battle it out like in an arena. The game highlights individual talent, strategies, the epic of motivations, the flow of tears and sweat, but also the strengths and weaknesses of the playersand not all of them are faultless: the Gattusian rebounder Hanamichi Sakuragi with red hair like Dennis Rodman, the center Takenori Akagi, the infallible shooter Hisashi Mitsui and the playmaker Kaede Rukawa. Thoughts underline actions: whoever falls can rise again, David can beat Goliath, the match is played in the last seconds, and even beyond.

The weaker team accumulates a disadvantage that seems unbridgeable: the comeback requires a titanic effort, especially mental. The cartoon is a crib of good intentions, bullies which with a rhetorical quirk become a boomerang, shots, inventions, impossible baskets. The competitive sequences are interspersed with unnatural pauses. The psychology of the players, highlighted by a pounding soundtrack, becomes a grammatical element of the story. A free throw takes minutes. Inoue takes care of the details, seeks emotion by surrounding the viewer. There is no trick that is spared. And if the comic has Hanamichi Sakuragi as its absolute protagonist, who joins the high school basketball team to win the heart of the kind Haruko Akagi, here everything revolves around Ryota Miyagi who traces his destiny as champion while, as a child, he greets forever brother, Sota, basketball ace. We find him at the age of 17 engaged in the final of the national interscholastic championship, star of a team of outsiders, Shohoku (red and black jersey like the Chicago Bulls), against the invincible Sannoh (black and white jersey like the San Antonio Spurs).

Everyone does their part. Everyone fights, saves, stops:
all-for-one-one-for-all, unity is strength, no one wins alone. Ryota fights against the pain of losing his brother and the guilt of those who survived and must fill the void in his mother's eyes. Everyone hopes to overturn the result until the end, exhausted or with a broken back, engaged in western duels, while the stopwatch dilates time and Inoue hooks the 2D animation to a ruthless CGI. The human figures become drawings in a symbiosis that makes you forget you are in a cartoon. It remains to say that someone conjuredto define the film, the poetics of Hirokazu Kore'eda, director of A family affair. Sidereal distance, but the variety of themes that Inoue deals with or touches on is encouraging.

THE FIRST SLAM DUNKS by Takehiko Inoue
(animation, Japan, 2022, duration 124')

Rating: *** out of 5

In cinemas from Wednesday 10 May