I’m a bit late on Volley-Bu this week, apologies for that. Between Jujutsu Kaisen and Dr. STONE releasing right next to it, Volley-Bu seems to be taking a back seat. But have no fear because I am in this for the long haul! All 12 episodes of it. So without further ado, lets dive in!
Production wise it was nice to see a return of the snappy direction. It’s not like Volley-Bu is well animated, the CGI volleyball barely even bounces half the time. But between the quick cuts, fast movement and good camera angles, Volley-Bu does a good job of tricking us into thinking its well animated. We can see examples of this early on in their training as Okuma, the rugby guy, joins in or later on in their match. It’s not perfect, a lot of the strikes still lack weight and the characters feel very stiff anytime the camera lingers on them to long on the court. Overall though this is a step up from last episode and a step in the right direction for the series. Lets hope it can keep it up for the next… 8 episodes!
Narratively though Volley-Bu continues to have problems. Just like last week rushed through Yuni and Haijima’s issues, this week Volley-Bu tries to do far to much in to little time. From Yuni’s inability to hit against blockers to Okuma joining the team to Haijima’s past issues with teammates, etc. It’s shoving so many different plot threads into a single episode without giving any of these any time to breathe. Take Yuni’s inability to spike for example. This was initially brought on by his first real experience playing and it heavily mimics Asahi from Haikyu. But where Asahi had to try and try again to get over it, was confronted on and support by his teammates on it, Yuni just… does it. Haijima gives him a little speech about “You are the ace and everyone knows it”, but never shows us Yuni as an ace.
What makes it worse is that prior to Haijima’s little speech, I thought Volley-Bu was doing something clever. That by taking him out of the practice Haijima was forcing him to focus on and learn his defense. Receiving, blocking, etc. Yuni has only done this for a year or two now, he has so much to learn. My hope was that Volley-Bu would help him get over his fear of blockers by educating him on what its like to be a blocker. That way he can both learn how to get around them and to feel the similar kind of fear they have when facing his spikes. But instead of doing anything interesting like that, Volley-Bu just says “You are the ace” and he suddenly gets over it. It was weird and poorly thought out and ultimately just a waste of time in the episode.
This is a bit of a shorter post, and I apologize for that. But Volley-Bu has really lost what interest I had with this. The whole show is, and I hate to keep comparing to the two but its inevitable, an knock-off Haikyu in every sense. The production is mediocre aside from some snappy direction, the characters and their struggles were all done better and the general pacing is just… garbage. Like, why should I care about this cousin suddenly? All we have seen him do is be a dick to Haijima and show up to a volleyball game yet Volley-Bu acts like I am supposed to care about this character. That’s the case with most of the show. It’s trying for emotional payoffs every week when it hasn’t actually earned any of them. And we still have 8 more episodes to go!
