Oppai Volleyball

I approached Oppai Volleyball with a degree of apprehension. The title seems pretty clear cut, but the movie itself turned out to not meet my preconceptions (thank you DoA: Extreme Beach Volleyball). It started off slightly cheesy and somewhat reminiscent of Green Green (a particularly lewd anime), replete with nosebleed scene and dirty jokes thanks to the flexibility of the Japanese language, but possibly, somewhat fortunately, that didn’t entirely set the tone for the rest of the film.Not having any knowledge beforehand of a majority of the actors in the film, nor the crew who put it together, I was rather disappointed in the palette and quality of the production. While it somewhat fits the feeling of the setting, 70s Japan, the overall picture seemed rather bland and uninteresting. There was a very restricted palette when it could have been a much more vibrant and exciting film. The title suggested something which would titillate (pardon the pun), but what it ended up being something that matched the look of the film, somewhat flat and lifeless, but not without its quirks and value.

The story plodded on at a somewhat tedious pace in many parts, although it was very well contained within the film, but it never really managed to excite. It was a somewhat typical coming-of-age film; some middle school boys obsessed with boobs and doing all they could to get their hands on and/or get a look at some. The film did continually hammer home this point, sometimes to a great deal of excess, and in the end it got somewhat boring. Yes, the film is called Oppai Volleyball, and yes, it’s about breasts, but it could have been so much more interesting.

The focus on breasts left the main male characters being rather underdeveloped. Only twice was any consideration given to character backstory, once from the main character, and it worked relatively well to build up motivation for her actions, and once for one of the boys. The rest of the group was left to be a gang of typical “boys will be boys” kids having their fun. That’s not to say the supporting cast wasn’t in place, but they were never used. Kojima Fujiko played a female classmate, and had she been given more to work with I believe could have added a lot to the interaction of the boys with the wider world. Instead they were boxed into obsessing about ‘oppai, oppai, oppai’ and their relationship to the rest of the school was only briefly explored.

That’s not to say it was a terrible film, but it was a let down. There seemed to be potential for something interesting to be done with the story. While it seemed to follow a pattern that I would compare to Cool Runnings, it was nowhere near as funny, and lacked the poignant ending which made Cool Runnings so great. As a coming of age film, it managed to show a single aspect of development of the main characters, but left a degree of emptiness in the viewer because there was little involvement with most of the characters. Not having seen a great deal of coming of age films, I couldn’t say how it fits in with the genre, but it felt like a somewhat cheap TV movie without the correct implementation of the story, and ended up being a bit of a drag despite its relatively compact 100 minute runtime. It’s not a film full of thrills and spills, and it won’t make you laugh all that often. If you are looking for something engaging and gratifying to watch, this is not it, but it’s still a film which, if viewed with the right approach, is watchable. Haruka Ayase manages a reasonable performance as the lead, but the balance of the film seems to let the story down, and it feels like it’s not entirely sure what it is trying to achieve with the material.