Haikyuu!! Character Design

 Hello once again dear readers,

For the past couple of months, I have been watching ‘Haikyuu!!’ an anime about a high school volleyball team and their rise to the top! Declan, author of puff pastry crusade recommended this show to me with high praise and I must say it has lived up to the hype. Engaging characters, exciting volleyball games, Haikyuu has it all. But how it pertains to my blog is the way the show uses character design to fill you in on details and tell part of the story.

What do I mean by this? Well, the main characters are all on one team that you follow for the entire show. These main characters have lots of opportunities to be developed and face problems throughout the show, but they are also going up against completely new characters every game they play, so how do they make you care about their opponents during these games? They design the important characters to look interesting. The animators are able to draw you in and be curious about certain characters just by designing them in a certain way. Like look at this team they play in the 3rd season, you can tell that the characters with crazy hair or a distinct feature are important and will be a problem for our main characters to defeat. The guy with the crazy red hair turns out to be a very good blocker, the guy with the distinctive eyebrows and the guy with the bowl cut are both very good spikers. The guy with number one is insanely good but you knew that going into the game. Despite never meeting numbers 8, 4, and 5 you know by the first glance that these characters are good at volleyball and will be trouble for the main characters.

Character design also lets you know about the personalities of the characters as well. Hinata is the main character (the one on the right) and the show tells you that he is hot-headed and brash by giving him fiery red hair and big expressive eyes, as well as showing you his passion for volleyball by focusing his eyes and making them sharper when he is on the court. You can see this with Hinata’s main rival Kageyama as well. Kageyama is cold and calculating on the court so he’s drawn with smaller sharper eyes and cold bluish-black hair, but he’s also a bit of a hothead as well so they gave him expressive eyebrows. By using these techniques they can tell you things about a character just by drawing them in a certain way, this is super useful in a show with lots of characters.

This use of character design to tell you about the characters really helps the show because there isn’t much time off of the court to tell you about the characters. You get invested in Hinata because he gets better at volleyball or his team wins an important match. The show essentially uses getting better at volleyball as character development. So the show needs a way to tell you about these players' personalities so that they can get to the volleyball, and sure they use a bit of flashback and conversations off the court but the way these characters are drawn is also a big part of how you know about these characters.

Well, that was my big rant about ‘Haikyuu!!’ I really like this show and I was super happy to find the links in it to my 20-time project and glad that I’m able to just write about a show I like. Let me know if you want to see more of these kinds of posts where I analyze a show and write about the character design, thank you for reading.