ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Haikyu!! The Dumpster Battle voice actors Bryson Baugus (Shoyo Hinata) and Clint Bickman (Kenma Kozume) about the English dub of the anime movie. The film, distributed by Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures Entertainment, will come to North American theaters on May 31 and will be available in Japanese with English subtitles and dubbed in English.
“Shoyo Hinata joins Karasuno High’s volleyball club to be like his idol, a former Karasuno player known as the ‘Little Giant.’ But, Hinata soon finds that he must team up with his middle school nemesis, Tobio Kageyama. Their clashing styles turn into a surprising weapon, but can they beat their rival Nekoma High in the highly anticipated ‘Dumpster Battle,’ the long-awaited ultimate showdown between two opposing underdog teams?”
Tyler Treese: Bryson, There’s a lot of grunting in the Dumpster Battle and in the series during these action moments. Are those always freshly recorded? You can’t just go into the back catalog and use an old grunt? What’s the process there?
Bryson Baugus: I mean, and Clint can probably attest to this as well, for the most part, we do go ahead and record everything as it comes. We record the dialogue, we record every individual grunt and every individual jump that happens in the moment. If they say like, “Oh, maybe that jump needs to be more intense,” we’ll take it again, or sometimes, if we do too many, they’ll be like, “Well, cut that one out, and then we’ll use it later,” if at the end of the session, we have like this big huge effort, they’ll be like, “Well, we have something like that. Let’s see if it works here.” But generally, we try to keep every reaction unique.
Clint Bickman: Sometimes they’ll save the really big one for last. Like, if you’ve got to just scream for two minutes, and they’ll be like, “OK, well, let’s do this at the end of the session so you don’t wear yourself out.” But the only thing that we recycle, I think, are sometimes, very rarely, like crowd noises. Because particularly in this movie, it’s like an entire hour of cheering, and I don’t know if they recorded all of that fresh. They might have taken some cheering from other places.
Baugus: I definitely have a couple of those long screams in this movie. Definitely saved those for the end.
Clint, what’s most exciting about seeing Dumpster Battle on the big screen because it is such an important clash. So it just seems quite fitting that it gets the movie treatment rather than being a couple of episodes of the anime.
Bickman: It is super, super nice and the movie is so packed. It’s so packed, and it’s so well animated, and it’s so tight. So it was really, really exciting. It was exciting for me, especially because I’ve been waiting for this part. For Kenma, this has been the buildup for the entire series to this moment. So I’ve kind of had a lot of time to get ready for it, and I’ve kind of really been anticipating it. So, yeah, this is really good, and I was very, very impressed with the movie. I worked on the English adaptation script for it, so I got to watch it ahead of time. So I was just more excited than I’ve ever been to record anything going in on this.
Baugus: You’ve gotten to see the whole movie at this point, and I haven’t even had the chance to. I’ve only seen my stuff. I can’t wait.
Bickman: Yeah. I’ve seen it several times and it definitely is worth watching several times.
Tyler Treese: Bryson, the anime wrapped in 2020. How has the four-year wait to jump back into these characters been?
Baugus: It’s been almost like putting on an old glove that you just know fits. Hinata Is one of the earliest roles that I got to play the lead role in. Whenever I go to conventions, he tends to be the one that most fans tend to recognize me for. So I’ll either be doing quotes in the voice and all that kind of stuff. So, his characterization, his voice, and his energy is just so locked in my mind that it felt like just returning home to like an old friend or something like that. It was very much like we’re back at it again. It felt so fulfilling to be able to come back to characters that I’ve been with for such a long time in my career.
Tyler Treese: Clint, you made a great point. The Dumpster Battle really is what Kenma’s arc has been building to. What have you enjoyed most about just seeing his growth throughout this series and getting this really great payoff?
Bickman: Well, I think the coolest thing about this with the movie is that it’s a series of matches for the game. Kenma sort of takes a different role depending on what game. He has a whole character arc that goes through the movie, and, in one of the games, he feels more like the antagonist, and then in another, he feels more like the protagonist. Before, Kenma was sort of a steady character and sort of a background character. In this case, I got to do everything, everything, everything with him. It was really nice writing the script ahead of time so I could really think about it and think, “Oh, I want to bring out this emotion here,” and “Oh, I wanna bring out this here and this here.” It felt like really a fantastic culmination of his character in the time that I’ve spent with him. So I feel just utterly satisfied.
Bryson, Dumpster Battle is such an intense movie, and we’re seeing Hinata really try to deal with the strategy put forth by Kenma. What do you like most about this movie, not just showing this very physical battle, but also his mental fortitude really shining by the end?
Baugus: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve always loved about Hinata is he’s just got this raw talent to him, but over the course of the series, he kind of develops that mentality of finding ways to approach different situations. Whereas when he was just starting off, he was like, “I’m just gonna run fast and jump high, and that’ll be like my thing.” What I do love about this movie is that it does show some of that internal struggle where he’s finding new situations that he’s never been put up against. Playing against old friends like Kenma, and Nekoma in general is one of the earliest teams that we meet in the series, and they form such a strong rivalry so early on. It’s so great to see those new situations brought about with familiar faces such as that.
And without going into too much spoilers and stuff, I just wanted to say that there’s a lot of really great moments where Kenma has Hinata just kind of trapped in his zone. He’s gotta find out, how do I get out this zone? Like I need to adapt my play style to make up for this position that Kenma has placed me in. I just love that dynamic with any characters in any show. I love it whenever they’re backed into a corner and they’re having to pull out all the stops to be able to adjust and adapt.
Bickman: They really put him through the wringer in the second game. The second game was rough. It was a a little hard to watch, I think, for Hinata fans. He really suffers, for sure.
Clint, my favorite scene in the Dumpster Battle is near the end. There’s this first-person perspective from your character. It is just an incredible stretch. What was kind of your reaction when you saw just how great that looked visually, and it’s just such a big moment for your character as well?
Bickman: Yeah, it was so cool. They did that a couple of times. I feel like the cinematography in the movie is a step up from the TV series and they did some experimental things in it, and it’s just really cool and really atmospheric. That is really, I think, is going to really surprise everyone. It was such a cool, such a unique scene, but recording it was insane because I just had to breathe for two minutes or four minutes. Just breathing heavily like that is really difficult. But we did it almost in one shot because it’s such an organic scene. I mean, I can’t talk about it too much because people haven’t seen it, but you’ll know it when you see it, when you see the movie, it’s something that really sticks out.
Baugus: And to the point of the cinematography, I actually caught probably one of the iterations of this first-person view because I was like doing some reactions in the background that you’ll hear or something like that. So I was able to see this shot, and I was like, “This is amazing.” Just the 3D camera movement with the 2D animation. It’s amazing. It’s probably some of the best animation work I’ve ever seen in an anime film. It’s amazing.
Haikyu has such a passionate fan base and you’ve been working on this show for many years at this point. What’s been just most rewarding about being on this journey with the characters?
Baugus: It’s been very rewarding because I feel like their journey as characters, Hinata and Karasuno, and even Kenma and Nekoma, their journey is my journey in that I was able to join this cast so early in my career. I think I was cast as Hinata about two years into pursuing voiceover professionally. I always loved the parallels to Hinata and his growth. He starts off, he’s got this raw talent, but he’s got a hunger to get better. I feel like that just really describes how I started off in this industry. I was very much still a newbie, but I had some experience going to college and doing theater and having all this amateur work behind me where I knew that I could do the job, but then I was presented, like I said earlier, with all these new situations where I had to adapt and improve myself. I feel like his journey throughout the series leading up until now has really paralleled that a lot
Bickman: When Haikyu got dubbed, it had been out for a little while. The manga had gained some momentum and the TV series had gained some momentum, and so people were really, really excited about it already. People knew who the characters were and the fan base was already super, super excited. So this, more than anything I’ve ever worked on, it was so amazing just to see the fan response to it and to kind of jump into that and see how new fans came into it with the dub and just see how that’s developed over the years. That’s been one of the most enjoyable parts of it for me.
Bryson, timeline-wise, the Dumpster Battle obviously takes place very late in the show, but I thought the film did a really good job of introducing everybody. Do you feel like this is accessible if somebody wants to bring their partner to see the movie with them?
Baugus: Clint can speak more to this as he’s seen the whole movie himself, but there’s a lot of reintroduction and reestablishing. One of the things that I love about the movie is that it showcases early Season 1 moments, but they’ve reanimated it with the new, super fancy movie budget, and we’ve been able to reestablish these characters, reestablish their stakes and their relationships. I feel like it very much stands on its own as a movie from what I’ve seen.
Bickman: Yeah. It does have a lot of flashbacks that cover things. So you do have this idea that the whole story is told, and all of the relevant information is there. So I think it’s good, obviously, for Haikyu super fans because it’s a continuation of the story. I think it’s good for lapsed fans because if you’ve only seen a little bit of Haikyu, I think you’ll definitely be good even if you haven’t watched it since the first season. And I think for people who are curious about what Haikyu is about, the movie tells a whole story in itself. You won’t catch every little detail, but you’ll get a great impression of what the series is about, and you’ll see a complete story.
Baugus: If you haven’t seen the series and you’re curious about what all the hype was about, you can see this, get a full experience, and be like, “I see what I’ve been missing.”
Thanks to Crunchyroll, Bryson Baugus, and Clint Bickman for discussing the Haikyu: The Dumpster Battle movie.
