Slam Dunk

Slam Dunk! Is a sports comedy anime telling a story of a school basketball team and a newcomer Sakuragi Hanamichi, who basicly joins the club just to get the attention of a girl after being dumped by girls way too many times in the past. And as you might guess, Sakuragi then truly gets interested in basketball after hard training and finding himself - what a surprise - a rival in both basketball and girl attention aspects. The story itself is pretty decent, maybe a bit too predictable though. The animation and sounds (music, voice actors etc.) in this anime is average, considering the fact ... that this anime has seen plenty of years already. The characters are pretty much ok too but I found them a bit dull and simple in the long run. There should have been more depth to characters fit in 101 episodes in my opinion.

Slam Dunk! Was a huge disappointment to me since I heard alot of people complimenting the manga. Now don't get me wrong, Slam Dunk! is funny, atleast for the first 30 episodes. After that is just keeps on going way too repetitive and slow and to be blunt I think this anime has like 60 episodes too many. Personally I almost had to force myself to watch the last 20-or-so episodes just out of the custom not wanting to leave anime half watched.

So if you are looking for a good sports comedy anime you should start with Hajime no Ippo or Prince of Tennis instead. That atleast is my opinion of the matter. If you are looking for an anime that you can watch you left eye closed and maybe even skip a few episodes here and there and still know where the plot's going then go with Slam Dunk!

-C

For a anime to be called Slam Dunk one of the most flashy, epic, move that blows away anyone watching, to then be so tedious and incomplete that I would have dropped it from the start.

Slam Dunk is jammed pack full of flat characters that make the same boring jokes and overall just annoy you the longer you watch. Making it all seem nothing is changing. If that weren’t enough recap and flashbacks are a constant occurrence too. Man what does this anime got going for it?

Not only is the general story a snooze to live with but so is the protagonist Sakuragi. ... He is the character that really can grind your gears, whether its when he get angry fast, using his loud mouth to get in trouble, being dense, embarrassing himself, or having a inferiority complex, he is a nuisance at best. Whenever he is on screen you just kinda feel pity for him but maybe in reality it’s just you slowly losing brain cells having to watch the mess that is Sakuragi.

Other characters like Rukawa also get old as well but they are usually the exceptions as the rest of the main cast are generally respectable and inspiring. The same can be said for the side characters like Sendou, Youhei, and the coach, they fit their roles and do it well.

Venturing onto animation and art it’s what to expect for its time. It’s solid and was probably insane for its time and even now it does the service proudly. But definitely not for the haters of old art styles or old anime in general. I mean the the show walks at a snail pace, how else could they pad up 101 episodes and not even finish it!

Anyway, Slam Dunk is a like a bag of questionable trail mix. Some parts pretty great, full of suspense and cool showdowns, but the other vast majority seems fishy or at least off in some way, leaving you feeling unsatisfied when they don’t finish off the story. All you can do then is look back at those so called epic moments and then realize that they were just slow action moments that squeeze your soul out.

To me, Slam Dunk was one of the anime I used to watch as a kid on AXN. It is about the national Shohoku basketball team developing their relationships as well as their fitness levels. This anime says that basketball really comes in all sorts of tricks and I like the way how they dribble the ball and throw the ball into the net. The net gives the score.

I loved the ending theme song "I have my eyes for you" by Maki Ohguro, one of the famous rock singers. The art was well done even though it was made in 1992.

They say that ... being a basketball player, you need to be muscular, physically fit and tall, not only that you also need to be more accurate in throwing the ball. These things come in hand to hand. The basketball players battled their way to being the best basketball team in every school. I liked how they learn as a team and how they develop as a team. They develop strategies to win the game. But sometimes strategies will not always work as sometimes things can backfire.

However, I feel that some characters are quite annoying like Sakuragi. He is arrogant who thinks he is always a genius in basketball, which results in him playing poorly and miss goals. However, as time goes by, he develops as a character. To me, I feel attached to the characters just to a degree.

The characters really didn't impress me that much.

Haruko is Sakuragi's love interest. However, the chemistry or connection wasn't that great.

As long as they condense the anime into shorter episodes then I would have a higher chance to like or dislike an anime.

However, Slam Dunk once an epic series in the 1990's, now is no longer epic. You can say the animation is outdated. But then again, it is a matter on the test of time.

I neither like nor hate this anime. I just have a mixed opinion. 6/10

So please, respect my opinion, okay?

Now I love slam dunk, but I hated the anime. The manga was so hype, so exciting, how could the anime be anything but amazing. Sadly, there were some problems with I had with the anime that ruined it for me.

Having read the manga I have to say that the story was quite cliché, but honestly I enjoyed it immensely. Also you have to remember that Slam Dunk came way before the wave of sports anime that popularised the genre. I found our first year hero, Sakuragi Hanamichi, to be a likeable character, but that might just be because I’m a sucker for delinquents. He ... exhibits absurdly fast growth rates in typical Shonen fashion, but he’s a self-proclaimed tensai so my opinion doesn't matter. The other characters get their screen time, but I really can’t be bothered talking about them all individually. Just note that they’re your rowdy second years and disciplined third years. The show stays true to the genre when you realise the team was dogshit before the year our hero joins, and the third years only have one last year left before they graduate and are determined to make the most of it. Whilst I actually enjoyed the building of the team as well as watching Sakuragi’s growth for the most part, the thing that really killed that anime for me was the sluggish ass pacing. To demonstrate this 25 episodes in and their team had only played in one game of ball. It was at this point that I lost patience with it and decided that no amount of eventual baddassery could justify watching anymore and dropped it.

Another problem I had with Dunk was its, frankly, outdated art and animation. While I thought the manga had excellent art, I could not say the same thing about the anime. I had once believed that I didn’t mind crappy art as I had watched stuff like Ping Pong the Animation (AMAZING) and had no problem with it at all. But once I realised that I had to sit through ONE HUNDRED episodes of what my 8 year old cousin could have drawn, it got very tedious after about 20 episodes. The sound was not anything notable either. The opening sucked and I don’t even remember the ending. Nothing notable from the BGM either.

While I gave it ticks for having solid characters and story, it was let down by its crappy adaptation into what we got. Dang. The manga was so good but sadly the anime does not even come close IMO. It was too old, to slow and too ugly for me to get into. Maybe if I had not first read the manga, I might have been more patient with it and stuck with it for longer. But it would not be something i would recommend to someone looking for a great series to start. My recommendation would be reading it over watching it.

Slam Dunk is a show full of colorful and memorable characters that is, ironically, slowed down by the basketball games they play in.

The main character, the genius himself, Sakuragi Hanamachi rides the fine line between lovable and insufferable. For 95% of the time, he is a loud and obnoxious goofball, always spouting about being a self-proclaimed basketball genius despite being a total beginner at the sport. However, because we see his constant failures and his relentless drive for improvement, Sakuragi manages to avoid being an arrogant and unlikable main character. Sakuragi's development as a basketball player is also impressive. Sakuragi's skillset is slowly built ... throughout the series and he doesn't magically become a highly skilled and well-rounded character like his rival/teammate Rukawa; his initial skill in jumping high for rebounds and endurance is realistically due to his naturally insane athleticism. These aspects of Sakuragi's character make him a character you want to root for. Despite his bravado, you want to see him overcome his obstacles and become a better player. His usual goofiness makes the short moments where he is serious and shows flashes of true brilliance that much more impactful and are the most anticipated moments of each basketball game.

The rough and tumble Shohoku High starting line up conists Akagi Takenori, Mitsui Hisashi, Miyagi Ryota, Rukawa Kaede, and of course Sakuragi. Each of them have unique personalities that entertainingly clash with each other. Their motivations and aspirations are interestingly explored, particularly Mitsui's story. Rukawa is an interesting foil to Sakuragi. The former is quiet and already an elite high school basketball player while the latter is bombastic and is just learning the game. Their rivalry is a source of lots of funny moments, but also a source of frustratingly drawn-out knuckleheaded plays by Sakuragi. The rest of the cast are entertaining as well, including Sakuragi's boisterous but loyal group of friends, Haruko, the object of Sakuragi's unnoticed love, and the opponents from other schools. The cast plays off each other very well and there is a very real sense of camaraderie built throughout the show.

Unfortunately for how much fun the episodes about training or exploring the various characters can be, the basketball games themselves tend to be not fun because of how long they are drawn out. So much time is taken up by the players on the court talking to each other, coach monologues, or a sequence where every single character in attendance react to something that happened. A large chunk of time is also taken up by Sakuragi daydreaming about how he'll embarrass Rukawa with his genius performance. These are the only times I am annoyed with how boastful Sakuragi is. The moments where the game isn't moving at a snail's pace, where something really cool happens, are teetering on few and far between. But the climaxes of each game are still satisfactory to even awe-inspiring. The highest highs of Slam Dunk are definitely found in the games, but not only after slogging through padded episodes with cool moments peppered throughout it.

If the amount of episodes for each game were at least cut down by a third, I would have enjoyed this anime a little bit more. Despite my complaints, there is still a lot to like about Slam Dunk. Slam Dunk is still a piece of anime history I don't regret watching all 101 episodes of because after watching it, it is clear that the genius basket-man Sakuragi Hanamichi's journey into falling in love with basketball set the standard that almost all sports anime afterwards go by.

I like the plot of this anime quite a bit, what's what makes it such a shame. The beginning is quite good with a classic art style to top it off, there are some gags which are decent as well. The MC is someone you want to root for despite his at times annoying personality.

All of this is unfortunately only at the beginning, as soon as the story moves towards nothing but matches they play out in exactly the same way, starting off with nothing but episodes with gags, this is 20% of the whole match, then we have 40% half gag and half flashbacks ... and then we end it all with 40% half gag and half serious basketball. Especially in later matches where the MC is basically playing for the opposite team, doing more harm to his own team than good, which in turn just makes for more "hilarious" gags.

In truth the gags are reused again and again until they're just annoying and you'd wish you could just see an anime with some cool basketball, but here it's lacking too, most of the play is just one guy vs a guy on the opposing team, no real team play and strategy, it's amateurish to say the least, no one's moving unless they have the ball and the coaches are basically cheerleaders.

TL:DR: Overrated.

When I started watching, I gave it a 9, and the more I watched, the more it got dull and the score went down. This will probably be the main theme of this review: Repetitiveness/Stretching.

Story 3/10
Again, at the beginning I would have rated it 7 or 8 maybe, as the story was diverse and unpredictable to some degree, and it would keep the viewer hanging. Basically, after that there is not much of a story. Just a basketball team trying to be the best. I think this is probably one of the main reasons why they stopped the anime; there was not much new to ... add.
But does that deserve a 3? In my opinion, no. However, they introduced a new element just to make it worse: Stretching. About 70% of the matches were viewing the crowd cheering, or some flashback. They could have just kept it under 40 or 30 episodes and delivered the same story.

Art 8/10
Just look at any photo of the anime, especially stagnant ones, and I think you will see something special about it. The characters seemed like real people (combined with the good voice acting). I didn't feel like I was watching regular "anime characters".
It gets bad usually during matches, but still, I left with the feeling of the overall picture being good and I think it's the best reference for someone who wants to improve his drawing like myself.

Sound 7/10
No complaints. I thought the voice acting was very fitting. The squeaking and the sound that plays when someone does some amazing dunk or move were cool. The background music and other sounds were okay.

Character 4/10
Again, at the beginning I would have scored it 8 or 9 maybe. Each character had their own thing and it was entertaining to see what they would do in new situations. But I think, contrary to most reviews I have seen; they didn't develop well, especially Rukawa, which was very disappointing.

Enjoyment 5/10
For me, the comedy was really good and one of a kind! I think I have never laughed that much watching an anime!!.. Unfortunately though, some scenes get repeated too many times that eventually I would not only find it dull, but I would HATE it seeing it again and skip it. It was like that from around episode 30. Though each time there is a novel scene, it's very delightful and funny.
The matches were enjoyable. Only when they were playing though.

Overall 6/10
Three things if they were taken out of this great show, it would have made it so much better. One: Repetitiveness.
And two: Repetitiveness.
And three: Have you guessed it?... Reiteration. Oh wait, that- Yes, it's exactly the same thing! This is how I felt watching this show. It seemed like the writers were too afraid to try something new as time went by. The characters get stuck in one dimension, no matter how they "changed" them. Everything was going in just one direction: Shohoku and Sakuragi getting better at basketball.

Okay here is my honest review. Slam Dunk is too overrated. So I was in a spree to watch sports anime when I came into Slam Dunk. After watching the review and rating I decided to give it a go.
As you might have read in other reviews as well, it is a story of a body named Sakuragi who starts playing basketball to get attention of a girl named Haruko. This guy is self proclaimed genius which is really funny for the first 30 episodes. But then it becomes really irritating, well come on we are here to sports and not comedy right. But this ... guy is just keeps irritating u with his genius lines. And then we have the other dumb character named Rukawa, who is just a lone player. I was expecting that Sakuragi might become a player like him in later episodes. But nope, instead they are always fighting(but they are in the same team).
Also, every time there is any match, there are more cheerleading shown than the match( you will keep hearing defence,defence,defence and then offence,offence,offence). Which is really irritating.
And then comes the flashbacks. Really how much flashbacks that this anime wanted to show us? I had to skip so many times.
Well finally at episode 86 I have dropped this, well I can’t bear the irritating characters anymore.
So if you want to give it a go, think first.