Summary
Working in multiple genres, Yuzuru Tachikawa has built up a reputation for his inventive mix of stylish aesthetic and shonen-infused directorial ability, as seen in projects ranging fromThe Lady Called Fujiko MineandDeath Parade, toBleachand, recently,Mob Psycho 100. With his newest film,Blue Giantas previously discussed withGame Rant, the director aims to shine a light on the Tokyo jazz scene through a trio of very differently thinking—and differently sounding—musicians.
Blue Giantfollows the story of a jazz saxophonist, Dai, who moves to Tokyo and starts a jazz band, titled JASS (which, funnily enough, was the earliest spelling of jazz). Working alongside a disciplined pianist and a ragtag roommate-turned-drummer, Dai and JASS’sperformances are shownthroughout the film in a way that mixes their progression with extended, artistic musical scores.
Immediate comparisons can be drawn toWhiplash, Damien Chazelle’s 2009 live-action American film that follows a promising jazz drummer as he continually sacrifices more and more to meet scrupulous demands of being “one of the great” musicians. Whereas that film focuses more on an individual’s sacrifices and theall-consuming natureof jazz as an art form,Blue Giantis more about the dynamics of each of JASS’s members.
The film’s soundtrack, featuring Japanese jazz virtuoso Hiromi Uehara, creates a very strong atmospheric mood for the film’s production, and the film has an overall musical feel that is precisely captured through Tachikawa’s fantasy-addled psychological portraits of each musician. While thefantastical colors and dynamismfeatured in the various performance sequences of the film are interior to the performers’ emotions, these “visualizations of the sound” take a surprising aesthetic note not entirely unalike Tachikawa’s prior work onMob Psycho 100.
While the art direction capturesBlue Giant’s musical overtones, the visuals are admittedly hampered by the film’s heavy usage of mocap-tinged CGI during its performance. The CGI itself doesn’t look particularly bad, but it’s noticeably ubiquitous during the various musical performances throughout the film. It makes sense why these performance sequences would beanimated in CGI, as they capture the physical act of performing a very intense style of music. Still, given that most of the film is in a 2D stylized to match the husky lineart of Ishizuka’s manga, the noticeable transitions between smoothly-rendered and lit CGI performance never fully gel with the other aspects of the film’s aesthetic.
Imagining these CGI performances in full 2D invites a longing for what it visually could have been; and even an entirely CGI film would have been commendable, as recent productions like 2022’sTrigun: Stampedeand 2019’sLupin III: The Firsthave shown that the aesthetic core of anime and manga can be faithfully conveyed in 3D. Blue Giant attempts to have it both ways, and it’s noticeable in a way not entirely dissimilar from the plot’s theme of the musicians needing to keep their individual sounds in-sync. That said, the updated Blu-Ray version of the film reported to becurrently screening in Japanese theatersincludes updated edits to the film over its initial theatrical release, a somewhat common practice in the anime industry to refine projects for their premium physical releases. And the majority of the film, already, goes a great way to capture the feel of its source material, making it worth considering for fans of anime and music alike.
Blue Giantwas theatrically released in North America by GKIDS on October 8 and 9 in select theaters. The physical release of the film is coming in 2024.
