Blue Giant

This is a film to see for the music.

The film is scored by the amazing jazz pianist and composer Hiromi Uehara, and every musical sequence is wonderful. The animation is also striking, from hyper-realistic depictions of Tokyo to imaginative representations of the musicians' inner worlds as they explore the space of chords and sequences of jazz improvisation.

On the other hand, the story is trite and predictable, and the characters are absurdly histrionic (as is typical in conventional animé). It also seems more a bit inappropriate that there's only one significant female character in a film so dependent on the musical ability of a woman performer and composer.

As a film featuring music and focusing on relatively niche genre, the performance and interpretation of jazz would naturally be the attention. Regarding this, the only I can say is impeccable. Every time the tenor saxophone is blowing fiercely with blue fire, I can feel the energy overflowing and penetrating through my skull until the backend so that my hair stands. Wild but sleek graphics, realistic depiction of life of artists, delicate storytelling that tugs at the heartstrings, and last but not the least, the powerful and passionate jass, all add up to not only the climax of the show, but also of the kind.

I absolutely loved this movie. The music was catchy and fun to listen to. The animation was stunning. Even when the animation was less detailed, it was still easy on the eyes and not distracting. The only animation feature I didn't like was the drumming techniques. The stick grips were a bit off, with the drummer holding them in a fist instead of a more refined grip. Other than this, the movie was wonderfully pleasing to my eyes and ears. I especially liked the group's final performance of the movie, since it showed growth for all the characters, allowing them to prove that they'd adapted and worked hard to become better musicians.

It was one of the anime that I really expected because it had the main theme of jazz. But it made me very disappointed in the meat. Ordinary storytelling has only superficial jazziness to the story. Anime about piano in the forest, although it's not jazz, it's more jazz than this one. What I'm trying to say is that it's alive, it's jazzy, this story has it in a sparse and dull way.

I'm reminded of a scene in this story where the main pianist is taught that his playing is shallow. Play within the frame Playing in a safe zone. I sat and laughed in my head as to whether they were cursing the script or not because the screenplay is ordinary and trying to be a safe zone like other anime.

I was disappointed with the choice of jazz as the theme of the story, but the narrative uses a young boy who is passionate. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing new about the script. It's like choosing a child as the main character of an anime. Other stories are very dull in the anime world. I can only assume that they don't want to change at all? Because young men sell more than middle-aged people?

The era of anime in Japan has been considered to be in the dark ages for a long time. Many people did not dare to take the risk of doing anything new or artistic. Everyone made commercial anime. Because it sells more than anime that has a complex script and has different and outstanding art.

Ultimately, Blue Giant is just an average anime in terms of script. The visuals are almost good, but their 3D animation is terrible. The jazz music is great but it doesn't help the anime's script. 7/10.

It's more than 'five-star-movie'. It is one of a kind and best music animation ever. The passion and emotion of this movie makes my heart beat. It is the first time that such an emotion has been felt since Slam Dunk. Japanese animation seems to be upgrading its value by expanding its scope to the art world. If you look at the original work, you can know the past of the main character, Dai, so please refer to it. In particular, the fact that Hiromi of the Grammy Award-winning jazz list participated in both music director and piano performance makes my heart race. I am serious about jazz enough to make up a quarter of the movie with music alone.