Let’s talk about Tendou for a bit
So we’re getting a bit more Tendou in S3 E2 and this is nice because Tendou is one of the more… interesting characters. In the manga he was one of the first ones I truly managed to despise (at least for like ten chapters). A lot of it has to do with the eyes, but also with the way he holds himself. His face is weird, he mocks his opponents at every turn, he’s got a Very Strange sense of humor and loyalty, and his posture always seems wrong, somehow. His neck is usually at an angle, he just feels… off.
And the anime takes that little factoid and runs with it.
Haikyuu’s animation is usually very, very smooth, you see. Tendou’s is not.
Dude is a twitchy bastard. He moves erratically when he’s not actually playing. And watching him this episode, combined with the voice, it took a while for me to put my finger on what it is that makes it so unnerving.
The swaying, the twitching… you usually see that sort of thing in zombie movies. His animation is basically that of a horror monster.
I mean, obviously he’s being set up as the antagonist for the next episode. He is the ‘guess monster’ after all, but I never realized you could put that level of detail into the way you make a character move.
Adding to this because I just got to watch the episode and I’m a film nerd:
The use of dramatic silence in that final scene after Tendou blocks Hinata is downright unnerving. The sound designers took the care to remove the sounds of the crowd (which, if you listen closely, are present throughout almost the entire rest of the episode, including the cut to Suga yelling at everyone to calm down, but it is cut out during other moments similar to this scene with Tendou), and they even added the hollow-sounding wooshing noise you often hear before scares in horror movies. The last sounds we hear before the horror-woosh (yes, that’s what I’m going to keep calling it) are the echoing of the ball dropping, Hinata’s gasp, and a slightly-muted whistle blow. The only sounds during the creepy horror-woosh are from Tendou himself, which is extremely reminiscent of horror monsters, especially Japanese horror – more on that later on.
It’s also notable that while they use this same kind of scene during other key moments, this one is the longest one by far, as well as the most unsettling. There was one earlier in the episode as well, when Tsukishima and Asahi failed to block a spike from Ushiwaka; that one quickly cut to various reaction shots and immediately got back to the match.
Besides the sound design, the block itself – which was framed in cooler, menacing purples in contrast to the bright, optimistic oranges that we’d just seen both Ushijima and Hinata framed in – is animated in such a way that it’s almost startling. I mean, we all knew it was coming, especially if we read the manga, but it’s still jarring to see Tendou’s hands stretching, distorted, out of the corner of the screen in the same style they like to animate things like Kyoutani’s spikes and Oikawa’s serves.
The last time we saw anything similar to this on a block was when Matsukawa scared Hinata into spiking a specific direction, but even that was softer-looking than this one, and slower, too.
The white-out after the block definitely also adds to the sense of unease in the scene. Immediately cutting to Kageyama’s face – which now carries a wide-eyed, shocked expression that we perhaps have never really seen before – and then allowing the rest of the scene to play out in pseudo-slow-motion (where everything still moves quickly, but the time between beats is slower than usual or slower than they should be) lets us know intuitively, before breaking down the scene more than we really should be like we are right now, that something is horribly wrong.
Back to Tendou and his specific motions and the shots during the scene:
- As he stands up, with his jerky, extraneous motions (and possibly a different frame count, but don’t quote me on that one), it’s notable that even while we’re looking at the scene from behind Tendou, his positioning has some connotations and foreshadowing: he’s framed between Kageyama and Hinata, and he’s facing distinctly toward Hinata. This framing presents the idea that Tendou’s entire focus is on Hinata, and that in itself is going to be what disrupts the freak duo, say, ‘coming between them’, or ‘driving a wedge between them’.
- Cut to an upward-facing pan up Tendou while he challenges Hinata. The fact that it’s upward-facing is also an important detail: upward-facing shots, especially of characters, makes them seem more imposing and powerful. During this, Tendou’s usual wide-eyed stare is narrowed down to a glare.
- The abrupt cut to the ending after the lingering close-up shot on Tendou’s face actually leaves us worried about our freak duo – more specifically, Hinata – and is pretty much Production IG’s signature in getting us to watch next week’s episode.
- Tendou himself is jarring because he breaks the sense of realism in the entire rest of the series by being so… off. He’s the only character that moves so strangely, and he seems to have not only supernatural speed that rivals Hinata’s spike and Kageyama’s toss (he jumped from the opposite side of Shirabu to block Hinata, like… please chill, lizard-child), but he’s the only one with a borderline-supernatural ability with his whole Guess Monster thing. He also breaks the fourth wall really hard in the next episode preview when he calls out “Stop! No spoilers!” (I’m not 100% sure about how much everyone else breaks the fourth wall in the previews but I’m not going to look through 56 episodes to find out). Tendou’s speech patterns are also odd, almost like he speaks with a different dialect, but he just puts a lot of emphasis on certain sounds and has an odd cadence (kudos to Subaru Kimura for bringing it to life so well).
- Also notable that his given name, Satori, means consciousness and refers to the Japanese supernatural creature that can read minds…. it’s even spelled the same way ( 覚).
Ya’know how I said I’d get back to Japanese horror and why Tendou’s sounds are important? That’s because in Japanese horror specifically, the monsters tend to have a “trigger sound”, a sound that alerts not just the audience, but also the characters in the movie to their presence. It’s not just Tendou’s movement’s that are unnerving and extraneous… he also makes extra sounds (including one specific sound earlier in the episode when Ushijima mentions that he’d met Hinata before that was very similar to the Grudge groan). We’ll have to keep an ear out for any more strange sounds from Tendou.
