English Dub Review: HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle

Overview:

Karasuno High volleyball team takes on Nekoma High volleyball team in the third round of the Miyagi prefecture tournament.

Our Take:

I guess I didn’t realize how long it had been since we last had some new Haikyuu!! content, but 2020 was when the last season aired. Now it makes sense why I’ve seen so much hype for this movie, it’s been a long time and fans are excited! I got into Haikyuu!! pretty hardcore there for a bit but then I fell off for a while so I forgot just how hyped this series can get.

Sports anime gets a bad reputation sometimes because I’ve heard people say that you have to be into the sport to enjoy it. This couldn’t be further from the truth because I don’t know anything about Shogi or ballroom dancing and I can tell you that March Comes In Like a Lion and Welcome to the Ballroom are some of my favorite anime. Some of the best animation I’ve seen in the industry has come from sports anime and Haikyuu!! is one of the heavy hitters.

One things most fans will love about this movie is it doesn’t waste anytime getting into the action of the match. With a runtime of an hour and forty-five minutes it makes sense that they don’t have time to waste. I can’t say enough good things about this series, and the voice actors are great as usual. From what I could tell all of the old cast has returned for thier roles, Bryson Baugus and Scott Gibbs return as Hinata and Kageyama which were the main two I was worried about. To the best of my knowledge Sentai held the rights to the dubbing of Haikyuu!! so I was worried Crunchyroll would hire new people but it looks like they didn’t.

As for the action and animation, it was all top tier. I love the imagery this series uses when it comes to the matches. Karasuno being the crows and when Hinata jumps it’s shown like a crow taking flight. There’s a portion of the movie where Nekoma is doing a good job of keeping Hinata in check and it’s portrayed as a cat clipping the wings of a crow, and caging it. So of course I got goosebumps when Hinata broke free of his “cage”.

There was a portion of the movie where it was first person from Kenma’s perspective. I thought this was a fantastic decision because it not only showed how hectic the game was, but it also showed how much work everyone was putting in to win. But the best part was that you could barely hear any of the music or dialogue over how hard Kenma was breathing. Even once we moved on from the first person perspective the breathing sound remained but now it was everyone’s. It was an awesome way to show how badly everyone was trying to win.

I love sports anime and Hakyuu!! was one of the first I tried. There are a lot of great ones out there but with this series wrapping up soon I think it’s a great time to think about where it will rank. Haikyuu!! is so great that I believe it has earned a spot as one of the best if not at the very top itself.