Haikyuu!! Anime/Manga Review
In collaboration with the Japanese television network MBS, Production I.G. and Toho created the shounen sports anime series Haikyu!! based on the Haruichi Furudate manga. The anime has five OVAs, four feature films, and four seasons. Sentai Filmworks owns the anime’s licence in the US and has translated seasons one through four into English.
Although the world didn’t end in 2012, if you were a fan of Japanese Boy’s High School Volleyball at the time, things were looking bleak. The number of students playing volleyball in clubs around the country had been declining for years, and in just that one year, the sport lost almost 5% of its surviving participants. But a weird thing happened in 2013. More gamers entered the game than left it for the first time in a very long time. After that, many more students began enrolling, and in 2015, enrollment started to soar. Two occurrences caused these spikes in attention. The first happened on February 20, 2012, when Shounen Jump magazine started serialising the volleyball comic Haikyuu by Haruichi Furudate. The second occurred on April 6, 2014, when MBS started showing production IG and Susumu Mitsunaka’s translation of the series.
Few series that have been featured in Shounen Jump during its many years of publication have had such a quantifiable and immediate influence on the actual world. Like any great manga and anime Garfield-Shaped pizza delivery application, Haikyuu is fun and captivating, but it’s also energising and encouraging. When you’ve finished viewing it, in that very particular way that makes you want to jump up from the sofa and go for a run. I can personally vouch for such strength. You will be encouraged by Haikyuu to start going to the gym consistently for the first time in your life. Your enthusiasm for sports anime in general may have also been sparked by such a series.
Haikyuu is a masterpiece whether you’ve seen it or read it. However, if you haven’t, particularly if you’re one of those geeky otakus who believes that sportsball stuff isn’t for you, you might be asking what precisely is so fantastic about it. This essay today could assist you in finding the solution.
When it comes to demonstrating what a successful sports anime can be given the correct cast, chemistry, location, narrative, and art direction, Haikyu is a series that is comparable to Free! Since its first release in April 2014, Haikyu has been airing. It is presently in its fourth season. After the third season concluded in December 2016, there was a significant pause. Unlike the previous three seasons, which debuted one after the other, season four’s premiere didn’t air for a full three years. The fourth season was scheduled to include two “cours” and would begin in January 2020. Originally scheduled to start in July 2020, the second “cour” was delayed until October 2020 because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Excellent shounen competition is the foundation of much outstanding Shounen manga. It provides for tremendous drama and frequently gives the plot a sense of forward momentum by establishing a natural motivation for both to grow quickly when two talented characters are constantly motivated to outperform one another. Haikyuu begins by introducing us to one of the finest rivalries in anime or manga. Rivalries are frequently the relationships in anime that we remember most and ship the hardest, a lot of the time.
Plot
The series centres around Shoyo Hinata, who was inspired to play volleyball after attending one of Karasuno High School’s matches and meeting The Little Giant, one of their players, on his journey to become a great player there. The net in volleyball is rather high. Players must either be tall or have tremendous leaping ability to reach the top of the net. With a canonical height of only 5 feet 3 inches, Hinata is quite small for a high school student. But he was motivated after watching The Little Giant play volleyball. Like Hinata, he was quite small, yet he had the tremendous jumping ability.
Hinata aspires to play volleyball in middle school, but when he discovers he is the sole player, he must spend the next two years attempting to recruit his friends to assist him in practice. This battle’s setup, in my opinion, was rather skillfully executed. It opens up a wide range of options for the remainder of the narrative and presents the protagonist with a fresh challenge. It also has a complicated enough background, which is a significant plus in anime, so that the audience can relate Hinata’s present acts to his past encounters.
Hinata forms a volleyball club with several of his classmates during his last year of middle school so they may compete in a competition, and lose. But as a result of this defeat, Hinata meets Tobio Kageyama, who will be her adversary for the length of the programme. In sports anime, the idea of competitors is heavily emphasised in order to advance the storyline. In this scenario, Kageyama is far more talented than Hinata, yet he has a cold, calculating, and nasty disposition that contrasts sharply with Hinata’s warm, amiable, and compassionate demeanour. Hinata learns that Kageyama is a teammate after he graduates and enrols at Karasuno High School. The plot centres on the development of Hinata and Kageyama as they cooperate with the other members of their squad to chase the ultimate success: the national championship.
Review
Here is the review of this series. My opinion is that the rivalry in Haikyuu is unique and a fantastic example of how to conduct a rivalry. I often find sports anime rivalry to be really draining and plain unpleasant. You end yourself pulling for one character or the other, usually the protagonist, and you become irritated by everything the antagonist does to obstruct the protagonist’s progress or otherwise fail to assist them. By giving each character the right number of defects that every character should have likeHaikyuu does, this is handled differently and avoided. Sometimes Hinata is just plain unpleasant, while other times you disagree with his approach and support Kageyama. Sometimes, Kageyama is a prick, and you just want him to listen to Hinata. I like that about the programme because it gives you time to grow used to the rivalry rather than having it consume you right away. Another component of Haikyuu that I truly enjoy is the show’s concentration on sports, which is evident but not always apparent. Almost every memory I remember of the programme involves a gym or occurs while the characters are participating in the activity. Yet, there is enough exposition and downtime to prevent the action from being nonstop and becoming monotonous over time. Additionally, it occasionally emphasises the characters’ long-term objectives and aspirations rather than the present.
In contrast to starting at Olympic skill levels, you get to see the characters genuinely develop during the drama. Yes, both Hinata and Kageyama are prodigies, but it soon becomes apparent that these shortcomings have a severe effect on their performance on the court. Even Hinata’s invincible spike has weaknesses; he isn’t always precise and will miss if someone other than Kageyama sets to him. Kageyama is a challenge to deal with on the court because of his attitude, and his constant pondering makes him easy to freak out. These character flaws are what makes the programme so unique and make the characters likeable and engaging.
The main character’s squad in Haikyuu does succumb to the clichéd sports anime stereotype of never losing. However, when Haikyuu performs it, it feels different. The programme does a terrific job of making the victories feel huge, as opposed to giving them to the protagonists suddenly on a silver platter. The major focus of the programme is on the characters as they adapt, grow, and improve their abilities and styles. Since his slow growth, it is much more rewarding to watch one of the characters successfully employ a new skill they have been practising because we are aware of the effort that has gone into it and can now enjoy watching it succeed. However, Haikyuu’s main selling feature is not only this payout.
The characteristics of the characters are what drive Haikyuu forward. They did a fantastic job of capturing the differences in high school guys’ maturity between years one and three. The portrayal of high schoolers in sports anime is a problem that is frequently disregarded. They never have that high schooler’s natural sense of amusement and enjoyment; they are constantly acting too maturely. Adult characters are acceptable, but if you’re going to write a novel about teenagers, I want the characters to act like teenagers. Even Free! doesn’t write its characters in the style of teenagers!
It’s entertaining and straightforward to follow, and at times it’s just as thrilling to watch sports on screen. This is a spoiler-free review and I hoped it would help you.
Recommendation
When the episodes are over, we advise you to watch a few related series, such as Kuroko No Basket, Free!, Naruto, Food Wars!, and so on.
