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In its explosive, almost impressionistic approach to musical sensation and its often-punishing viewpoint of the grit required of artistic success, you couldn’t call Blue Giant short on passion. Adapted from the manga by Shinichi Ishizuka, the high points of Yuzuru Tachikawa’s film elicit the euphoria of live music as it goes on a whirlwind tour of Tokyo’s jazz scene. Musical solos turn into dazzling explosions of color and light, and the sensations and thrill of playing translate into wildly expressive imagery: At one point, a saxophonist hits a perfect note, and for a moment the instrument seems like it stretches into the infinite.
The sax player is Dai Miyamoto, and the film consolidates the manga’s broader arc into a snapshot of his attempts to make it big in Tokyo. After he moves into the city he reunites with an old friend, Shunji, who would later become part of a band together with him and the prodigal pianist Yukinori Sawabe. Speaking to Tachikawa in London, he says he wouldn’t have called himself a jazz enthusiast before he joined the film — now, not unlike Shunji in the film, the bug has got him too. “The first thing I did when I started making this film was start learning the sax and go to some jazz clubs,” he explains. When pressed on how the saxophone playing was coming along, he elaborates: “So, I went to lessons for two years and I can play some basic pieces,” Tachikawa mused. He adds: “I can’t play the pieces in Blue Giant, they’re way too hard for me.”
The Joy of Sax
It’s a film that not only engages with the broader emotional requirements of becoming a successful artist but also marvels at technical precision — and to show that, it needed to show the intricacies of the instruments themselves. “Everything I learned was beneficial to the film because I’d never held a saxophone before,” he says. “I didn’t know if you press here, what happens? I didn’t know how to put my lips around the mouthpiece; absolutely everything I learned from scratch. And I also got some of the team as well to go to a sax lesson just so they could also get a feel for how it’s made.”
Although animating instruments and live musicians at the top of their game is tricky enough, naturalistically portraying amateurs might be even more difficult — one of Blue Giant’s leading trio, the amateur drummer Shunji, was an interesting challenge to get around, if only for the simple fact that the musicians they were using for reference were simply too good at what they do. Tachikawa explains, “The drummer is Shun Ishiwaka; he’s really well known in Japan. Even when he tried to play badly, it was still really good, and I had to keep telling him to do it worse.”
To get a feel for the movements of an amateur, Tachikawa went DIY again: “I went to a drum lesson as well and got a feel for just how bad a beginner it would be, and that was what I was aiming for.” Of course, though, they had some experts playing behind the scenes.
Together, Ishiwaka, saxophonist Tomoaki Baba and legendary pianist Hiromi Uehara, who also composed the score, played the instruments of each character of the core trio — though Tachikawa noted that they used independent sessions with different artists to use for reference footage. The music was written and recorded first, Tachikawa emphasizing that Uehara was actually “on board from the beginning.”
The sessions in which they recorded the music for the film were separate from the sessions used for animation reference. According to Tachikawa, “They actually tried hard to stay still, so as not to make any noises that might be picked up on the recording, but Dai’s style of playing is very dynamic, and he moves around a lot; it’s very exaggerated movements. So, although I did reference their expressions and the movement of their fingers when they were actually recording the music, the movement comes along later at the animation stage.” For this, Tachikawa had another set of musicians whose sessions performing the pieces were “more about the movement.”
‘We wanted to get people listening to jazz and to get people thinking of it as not something slow and boring, but something passionate and emotional.’
— Director Yuzuru Tachikawa
In capturing the movements of these players, the animation had to be dynamic itself and required the interweaving of traditional 2D drawings and CG animation. Tachikawa briefly talks about the logistics of it, saying that “the performance spaces are 3D, and so with the camerawork, it would’ve been hard to just have the characters in 2D. So, for those parts, the characters are CG as well.” Tachikawa also mentions the merits of both mediums, in the case of 2D, the potential for exaggerated expressions and deformation of the characters.
The director says deformation and exaggeration stand out about the musical sequences, in addition to the passion and the pace. The film impresses with its attention to technical detail in instrumentation but also the dreamlike expressionism of its musical sequences, as Tachikawa shows what the performers are seeing when they’re in the zone. A lot of what they were seeing — the use of color and flashes of light in corresponding with the sound — might remind some of something like Disney’s Fantasia’s “pure sound” segment.
The director mentions that he did watch Fantasia, as well as a lot of different music animation, but also pointed to older art animation. One particular piece of animation that stood out in his mind when shaping Blue Giant was Norman McLaren’s 1955 short, Blinkity Blank, because of how “it’s not actually animated; he creates colors by scratching film.” Such a form of expression didn’t just have some bearing on Blue Giant, it also held some sway over his other work — the director highlighting his beloved anime TV series Mob Psycho 100 as one example.
Although the film takes place in a Tokyo jazz scene, which seems to exist just out of sight, Tachikawa hoped to present jazz as something universal, not simply niche. When thinking about a sequence from the film that stood out to him the most, he cited the performance of “First Note.” The director says it was a definitive point for them “because, to begin with, we didn’t know what Dai’s saxophone playing would sound like, and that was the piece where we worked out, figured out his sound, and came up with that, so it was an important piece.” But it also spoke to that goal for the film. “We wanted to get people listening to jazz and to get people thinking of it as not something slow and boring, but something passionate and emotional,” he says. As Dai and his bandmates play their hearts out, the passion of Blue Giant is infectious — just as much as the catchy rhythms of its music.
GKIDS and Shout! will release Blue Giant on DVD/Blu-Ray on April 30. Pre-orders are available at bluegiantmovie.com.
