The First Slam Dunk

It's a computer animated anime-style rendition of the last chapters of the Slam Dunk manga. It doesn't start from where the anime ended, but not very far from it. The movie centers around the final game of the team against Sannoh and the life of Ryota Miyagi, one of the Shohoku players. It has great action, is made by the original mangaka as a film director, it has the usual excess of emotional flashbacks in the middle of the game that characterizes him and it's great. It took me a while to get used to the animation style, maybe because I am very fond of the anime stylization of the nineties. Maybe I'm a nostalgic (I am) and also probably it fucking looked neat as fuck. The last ten minutes are a visual joy to watch. Very good. Story driven, emotional introspective, sports anime. It lacks a bit of the goofiness of the original, probably because Sakuragi is not the main main character of the show. Overall, it's not perfect but at least it's not a soulless reboot of a cult piece of media what has all the superficial traits that make it recognizable but without utterly mutilating the intangible that made it irreplaceable. I know that's a low bar to set, but the world has been surprising me lately in that regard. I watched it in Español Latino because I couldn't find it in any other language and still liked it, and if that doesn't say enough, I don't know what will.

Man, this shit review was so fucking hard for me to write.

A couple of days before, I was looking for reviews of the movie on youtube to see if it was actually worth watching at all. I almost hoped it wasn't, so I don't have to do it and can delve in my usual rancor about new things. Also, somebody remembered me I was told to watch it in theaters with a friend like a year ago and totally forgot about that. To my dismay, the movie was supposedly actually good, but the stupid usual youtuber reviewers were not saying anything relevant about the movie and only talking about the animation and about how they went to see the movie and how they didn't even knew about the series before that.

Fuck.

Because now I want to write about this, but I don't want to be one of them talking about nonsense of their own life that doesn't interest me and the slightest but at the same time this series, this manga is so intertwined with my personal life that I can't mention anything about it without an emotional flashback about myself being flashed into the screen at the same time. I have so many superficial stories and transcendental details (or what I call them, memories, this movie is in some many ways about memories). What do you mean you haven't even seen the series you are reviewing?! Why are you reviewing this in your shitty youtube channel then?! To create random content about things you don't even care about? For five thousand shitty subscribers channel? Are you going to make it big in the Internet, son? Fuck you. You know nothing about anything. I started playing basketball because of this series. That's about six years of my life, and more in my head. I have a Shohoku shirt in my closet, that is not even the one of the main character and only wear in special occasions. I have shown the complete series to three of my girlfriends, almost as a rite of passage. I have listened dozens of times and get (how do you call in english "pell de gallina") goosebumps doing so the openings and endings of the series while not watching the series. The imagine on top of this article has been my screen saver for years. And I am not even a weeb. I don't even watch anime anymore. Did when I was a kid, and then stopped, like normal people do. It's not even about the anime being specially good, even though it is, nor about the obvious overblown hype and dramatization of every possible little thing the Japanese like to do, but more about the capacity of seeing what I see, feeling what I feel, when actually playing basket and doing things. How all of life holds in a single moment, and how at the same time they are mundane and even vulgar scenarios and invented fights. I see a game, I see a story. I could spend the rest of my life talking about those forty moments and what are they for every single person on the field, and then about how they are forgotten most of the time the day after. I am not going to start with the whole "this has helped me through hard times" as if this was a comment section on reddit. Shonen is not an emo song, it's part of a monomyth; almost a church of the narrative of the hero religion. Shonen didn't help me in certain moments of my life, shonen configured a deep basic unconscious being in itself in my psique that manifested in virtually all moments of my life; good or bad or irrelevant. I don't know what else to say. I was a follower. In a way still are. I am not going to delve into heroic existentialism and masculinity today, but you get the idea.

With time, one surrenders many things. I made a comeback, last year, of playing basketball. Maybe I had left something on the field. I returned rusty, unmotivated, ten years later. And the found myself more free than what I remember being. When I entered the field, the moment my feet crossed the line, it was like if I was entering inside a very holy cathedral. You hear yourself, the characteristic sounds of the trade. I remembered I used to want wings.

I have great memories from that time. But just memories. Now I don't play anymore (again), but the feeling is still there somehow. There's not youthful idealism, but there's still some fight.

For some time, I have been fantasizing about a manga or anime or something I will never write. Mainly because I don't want to, even more mainly because I can't draw. It was about a group of players in a highschool basketball team (I have always been very original) that do all the usual stuff; they have stories and background and inner monologue and motivation and stakes. But they always lose. And despite all odds, despite all obstacles, they struggle to improve and keep going and sacrifice everything. Only to lose again. I would find newer and more exciting ways to build up the cathartic narrative of eucatastrophe in the audience just to smash it again and again. Basting open the idea that you should never give up and that effort and even defeat always has a silver lining or any hope any viewer dares to have. They just can't, they are just not good, not talented, not tall, not special. And no amount of narrative can solve that. I will go until the point the audience starts to root for them to finally give up the whole basketball thing, to stop destroying the lives of everyone around them and themselves, watch how they grow bitter towards each other and themselves, more resentful, more petty, less well adjusted persons. Until they start to even feel a guilty sense of schadenfreude towards their suffering, and thinking they deserve the disaster they are bringing upon themselves.

And then, after a disappointing and critically booed series finale that grew too abstract and philosophical and Evangelionesque, I will make a final movie or OVA or final chapter. Bonus points if I disappear from the public sphere during some years and presumed dead, until I come back to make the great reveal of a comeback. It will start by showing the lives they have when they are older. Somewhat mundane, somewhat good, somewhat sad. Some of them still live in the past, eternal child as a result of the existential trauma I have inflicted them as if I was AM from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream". Others have more or less forget about it like a bad nightmare. The wife of one of the now grown boys, will ask him to empty the closet to make space for their second baby or something like that. There, he will find photos, and start to reminisce this almost repressed memory. Then, in a forgotten box in the bottom of it all, the old basketball shoes. It will cut to him wearing them, stepping in a street court, not knowing why he's doing this. There, he will find one of the other players. They are not even "the" main character of the show, just glorified side characters where some of the heart of the shows gets explored and appear in endings. The other man goes there often, all wearing basketball attire that looks terrible on his middle aged fat body. They talk, play a little, and somehow make it a routine. The wife is furious because he hasn't get rid of the old shoes, they remind her of "bad times". In a montage, it is shown or implied that they start to call other old players, and they talk between to them with a photography of the whole team in the hand. He starts crossing names from some sort of list. The day arrives, and five of them show up in the street court. They have all changed. Everyone has his life, and motives. Unsure of what to do, unsure if to even dare to shoot, they sit on the edge of the court, and a moment of silence. A group of other, similar, middle aged man appear. Only they are laughing and having a good time. They are also former student players. Some of them recognize each other. "Want to play?" So they begin playing. More people starts to appear. Other relevant characters. The wife, his little girl children, that cheers them up from the other side of the fence. "Daddy! Daddy!" And the game grows in momentum, them absolutely focused, concentrated, ready to vindicate a whole life in a single moment through sheer fucking will.

And then they lose. Badly. They get absolutely smashed. I mean, it wasn't even close. The other men, that have always won against them, are good sports about it, and even try to go a little easy on them and let them score some easy points, which only adds to the pathétique. The hero narrative is further destroyed by the evil villains being neither evil nor villains. Even the little girl notices and cringes, losing a bit of respect for this own father, shattering too early the illusion of his figure as an infallible role model. They try to talk to them afterwards. Like, don't take it so seriously, it's only a game. We are grown now, we are here to enjoy and have fun. But that doesn't work. Some are crying. Some catatonic. Some just leave. It's not a game to them, can never be. It will always be failure. After more than a decade, nothing in won, nothing is learned only wounds were reopened that maybe would had actually healed if they didn't, but now that they have now it's definitely too late.

And then it ends. Nothing. No uplifting anything, nothing. Not even disaster or tragedy. Just nothing.

Do you like it? It even has a name. I call the anime "The Art of Surrender."

I used to own a copy of the last manga book of Slam Dunk. It was like a treasure to me. A talisman. I read it in very deliberate moments. It almost doesn't have any text and it's a beautiful piece of art. Takehiro Inoue is probably my favorite illustrator (sorry Miura). It got stolen or lost with the rest of my books when our flat in Barcelona got ocuppated by Pakistanis during the summer. I had forgotten about it until I saw the movie. "The First Slam Dunk". What a great name. Not the last (because it was the last) but the first, as the series itself being the preamble of a whole generation of players. I never get to be poetic like that. In some way, this whole thing is something I had at some point surrendered, in order to survive. But now, the same way I played some basketball again, maybe I want to have that last manga again in my hands. Who knows. Maybe I left something there too.