125 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | GKIDS
A point guard the size of nobody takes the floor against the best team in Japan. The game runs the length of the film, but the story is everything that happened before tipoff. Takehiko Inoue adapts his own manga and turns a basketball game into a movie about grief.
Ryota Miyagi is the smallest player on the Shohoku basketball team. He plays point guard against Sannoh, the reigning national champions, in a single game that runs nearly the length of the film. The match is the frame. The real story lives in flashbacks to Ryota’s childhood in Okinawa, his older brother, and the death that shaped him. Takehiko Inoue takes the manga that defined a generation of readers and recenters it on grief, not glory.
Shugo Nakamura voices Ryota with a quiet that the court strips away. Off the floor he is guarded and small. On it he becomes the fastest thing in the building. Subaru Kimura plays Hanamichi Sakuragi as raw aggression with no off switch, and the contrast with Ryota’s control is the engine of the team. Kenta Miyake gives captain Takenori Akagi a low growl of authority. Jun Kasama makes Hisashi Mitsui carry the weight of a player who quit and came back.
Inoue directs his own adaptation and uses the camera like a broadcast that has freed itself from gravity. He swings around the players in long unbroken takes that track the ball down the floor in real time. The animation blends hand-drawn faces onto CG bodies, and the seam mostly disappears once the bodies start moving. Sound is the weapon here. Inoue drops the score and the crowd to silence at the free-throw line, then slams the noise back the instant the shot releases.
This is a sports film that understands the sport is never the point. The game against Sannoh is won or lost on the court. What Ryota is actually playing for happened years before tipoff and a thousand miles away. Inoue trusts the silence and trusts the cuts to a dead brother to do the work that dialogue would ruin. He turns a basketball game into a film about the people who are not in the gym to watch you play.