The long-awaited The First Slam Dunk movie posted its first official poster on Saturday. While worldwide fans cheer for the return of Takehiko Inoue’s classic Basketball franchise after all these years, the film will be hitting theaters across Japan on December 3 without revealing any international plans as of this writing.
More information about the movie project will be shared on Toei Animation’s official YouTube channel on November 3, and since there has been very little actually shown from the movie, there is a good chance we’ll get to see a new trailer for it.
All we know so far is that the original series creator Takehiko Inoue will be writing and directing the film created by Toei Animation and DandeLion Animation Studio. Yasuyuki Ebara is working as the movie’s character designer and animation director. Daiki Nakazawa will be handling the CGI, who was also the CGI director for the films Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and One Piece Film Z. No cast has been announced for the film yet.
▍About The First Slam Dunk Movie
The First Slam Dunk movie will be the series’ first feature-length film. The series previously released four short films back in the mid-1990s and a total of 101 TV anime episodes that were released between 1993 to 1996. The anime series is a direct adaptation of the manga created by Inoue, which began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1990 and came to a conclusion in 1996 with its 31st volume.
The original Slam Dunk manga centers on Hanamichi Sakuragi, a delinquent and gang leader. Sakuragi is very unpopular with girls, having been rejected an astonishing fifty times. In his first year at Shohoku High School, he meets Haruko Akagi, the girl of his dreams, and is overjoyed when she is not repulsed or scared of him like all the other girls he has asked out. In order to impress Haruko, Sakuragi joins the basketball team and later realizes that he has come to love the sport.