Haikyu!! the Movie: The End and the Beginning
ハイキュー!! 終わりと始まり (Haikyuu!! Movie 1: Owari to Hajimari)
- Sports
- School
- Team Sports
- Episodes
- 1
- Duration
- 1 hr 29 min
- Aired
- Jul 3, 2015
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
After seeing Karasuno High’s “Little Giant” pull off a hard-earned win on television, Shouyou Hinata becomes determined to take up volleyball and chase the same kind of flight—despite his small stature. When he finally enrolls at Karasuno, he heads straight for the volleyball club, only to come face-to-face with Tobio Kageyama, the “King of the Court” and the prodigy setter who once handed him a crushing loss in middle school.
Their tense reunion quickly turns into a rivalry that puts them at odds with the rest of the team, and Karasuno refuses to accept either freshman until they can prove they can play together. Driven by their shared hunger to be on the court, Hinata and Kageyama push themselves toward cooperation, forming an unusual setter-and-attacker partnership just as a familiar rival school challenges Karasuno to practice matches, stirring old competition back to life.
Otaku Consensus
The End and the Beginning earns its reputation by turning early Haikyu!! material into a high-energy theatrical primer, with Production I.G’s readable sports animation and Taku Kishimoto’s compression of the TV arc preserving the series’ emotional momentum. Critics and fans consistently single out the volleyball set pieces, the freshman rivalry chemistry, and the “hype” visual peaks as the film’s real value. Its main limitation is baked into the format: as a compilation movie, it offers limited new material and can feel less essential to viewers who recently watched the series.
Why You Should Watch
If you want sports-anime adrenaline without signing up for a full season, The End and the Beginning is the tightest doorway into Haikyu!!’s appeal: school-club pressure, team chemistry, and volleyball sequences that make positioning feel like combat tactics. It scratches the same competitive itch as Kuroko’s Basketball, but with less superpower spectacle, and it has the earnest club-room texture that sports-anime fans often chase. The feature format trims the early TV material into a cleaner emotional ramp, so it works best for newcomers testing the franchise or returning fans who want the Hinata/Kageyama ignition point in one sitting. Viewers who expect anime films to deliver brand-new canon should know this is valued more as a sharpened recap than as a separate sequel.
Key Characters
- SShouyou Hinata
Fans often read Hinata less as simple underdog wish fulfillment and more as the series’ kinetic engine: his awe, frustration, and explosive movement make volleyball feel discoverable even to viewers who never cared about the sport.
- TTobio Kageyama
Kageyama’s appeal lies in how his precision as a setter is treated as both a weapon and a social flaw, making the “King of the Court” label a technical problem as much as a personality one.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
Produced by Production I.G, the film preserves the TV series’ emphasis on readable court geography: serves, receives, jumps, and timing are staged so the viewer can follow the play instead of only reacting to impact frames.
- 2
The movie functions as the first theatrical compilation for Haikyu!!, released on July 3, 2015, and condenses early TV material into a single feature rather than presenting itself as a standalone sequel.
- 3
Taku Kishimoto’s series-composition credit matters here because the film’s success depends on compression: it has to preserve rivalry, team friction, and match momentum without the breathing room of episodic television.
- 4
Its reputation is unusually strong for a recap film, holding an 8.12 MAL score from more than 51,000 votes and a 78/100 AniList score, which signals that fans value it as more than disposable franchise packaging.
- 5
The review language around the film repeatedly centers on physical excitement: viewers describe “hype moments,” “stunning artwork,” and out-of-seat reactions, which matches Haikyu!!’s appeal as a sports series built around rhythm and release.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The Japanese subtitle Owari to Hajimari translates directly to The End and the Beginning, a title that fits the film’s role as both a closing edit of early material and a franchise entry point.
- Fun fact 2
- The official genre and theme data keep the categorization narrow: Sports as the genre, with School and Team Sports as the themes, reflecting how focused Haikyu!! is compared with hybrid battle-school anime.
- Fun fact 3
- AniList’s tag breakdown is revealing: Volleyball leads at 80%, Shounen follows at 79%, and School Club at 70%, while the unexpectedly specific “Cute Boys Doing Cute Things” tag still registers at 60%.
- Fun fact 4
- The film’s core creative lineage is directly tied to the manga: Haruichi Furudate is credited as original creator, while Taku Kishimoto handles series composition for the anime adaptation.
- Fun fact 5
- Despite being a single finished movie rather than a TV season, it has a sizable database footprint: MAL lists it at rank #559 with popularity #2042, while AniList records 331 favourites.
Studios
- Production I.G
