In jazz and blues, a blue note is one pitched differently from those around it, for expressive effect. It is a description that might equally apply to the determined, demonstrative young hero of Yuzuru Tachikawa’s anime.
This keenly anticipated adaptation of Shinichi Ishizuka’s manga about a teenager from rural Japan striving to become the world’s greatest jazz musician is part bildungsroman and part Rocky with jazz. (Stay tuned for spectacularly animated montage sequences.)
Arriving in Tokyo from a small town, Dai Miyamoto (voiced by Yuki Yamada) has been playing the saxophone for just four years. What he lacks in experience he makes up with unbounded passion – he goes running in cold weather and practises under bridges to improve his breathing capacity. Determined to make his mark in the city, he encounters Yukinori Sawabe, a piano prodigy who is as devoted to classical technique as Dai Miyamoto is to radical improvisation.
The mismatched 18-year-olds are joined by the novice percussionist Shunji Tamada, another big-city arriviste from Dai’s far-flung northern town. They swap crude remarks about the opposite sex, occasionally squabble, and work towards baring their souls through music under the band name Jass.
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The animators marry 3D modelling with pretty 2D drawings to capture the precise fingerwork of the performances. Swirling flights of fancy add visual improvisations to the spontaneity of the protagonist.
A carefully calibrated soundtrack composed by the celebrated jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara steals the show, with music that variously references the muscular brass of Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Working in Goldberg Variation-sized pieces, she channels Bill Evans to complete the 20th-century vibes. (Unhappily, the pianist is the only woman of note headlining the production.)
Blue Giant is as improbably close to watching a live performance as animation can get. A swooning big-screen experience.
Blue Giant is in cinemas from Wednesday, January 31st
