REVIEW: Blue Giant’s Anime Adaptation Brings Jazz to the Big Screen, But At What Cost?
Jazz as a medium is defined by its encapsulation of human expression in musical form. Diffused through many subgenres and styles as it found new life in cultures around the world from origins pioneered in the New Orleans African-American communities of the early 1900s, the style is defined by smooth, complex chord and melodic expressions and improvisation. It’s a style with a voice all its own, packed with emotion and a story to tell, often making many of its styles and sub-styles a reflection of the player.
Blue Giant is a movie adaptation of a manga about jazz, and a trio of young men who perform it. It’s about their music and their story shining on the stage as they perform together, where the story should be best told by combining powerful, expressive animation with sonic personalization that comes together to define these characters more than any dialogue they could share together.
Capturing this feeling is both Blue Giant’s biggest strength and greatest weakness.
When Blue Giant debuted on the pages of Big Comic in 2013, critics showered the series with awards for its story on Sendai-born Dai Miyamoto’s journey to become a jazz musician. His story begins in high school when he received a saxophone from his brother and develops into a deeper passion with career prospects after a move to Tokyo puts him in contact with budding jazz pianist Yukinori Sawabe, who alongside Miyamoto’s childhood friend Shunji Tamada as a beginner drummer come together to form the youthful trio, “Jass.”
Over their journey they overcome trials and tribulations as they improve as a group, building a fanbase for their music through passion, style and self-composed jazz classics that play to their strengths in order to get the attention of the owners of a world-famous club, complete with training montages. Far from feeling generic, it’s a story that understands not just the sound of jazz but what it means to perform and love your art.
As an anime, however? It’s rough. It can be difficult to look at this story and not see a reflection of the tribulations facing modern anime production shining back at you from the silver screen.
If jazz truly is the musical voice of a person’s passion, their struggles, their desires, their very existence, how do you bring this to life? In theory, the anime has one clear advantage over the original manga: no written work possesses a sound of its own, leaving merely the artwork with the responsibility of bringing this soundless sound to life. Through anime, you have sound and visuals, with the potential to turn the audience in the theater into one seated in the fanciest jazz club in the world.
To do so, however, requires visuals that match the story being told and the music being performed. This aspect simply isn’t up to scratch.
For all the underlying story lifted from Shinichi Ishizuka’s original manga is strong, the animation work from Studio NUT is often stilted and rough even in the most static of conversations the trio have in the disused jazz bar they use to practice their craft. Yet issues on the animation front go far beyond some stilted conversations.
Animating musicians in a 2D space is one of the most difficult tasks you could give an animator, as the intricate graceful movements of fingers across the piano or saxophone require time-consuming detail to make appear realistic. Relying on CG animation in these moments is hardly a fair thing to critique on this basis alone. Its half-measure implementation is far more troubling, however.
Yet the CG animation used to cover these performances feels haphazard as it not only noticeably clashes with the design aspects of the 2D work, it reduces this freeform medium into robotic, cold, jerky movements. It feels like an AI interpretation of a soul: technically correct, but lacking the human meaning that gives these performances life. Between this unfinished CG and static 2D animation, the movie at times feels unfinished.
It’s an issue only compounded by just how crucial these musical scenes are in telling this story. Each performance is a culmination of everything that came before it, a hurdle the group is overcoming on their journey. In the rare moments when the animation is up to standard and beautifully-rendered, intricate fingering combines with transcend sounds from jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara’s soundtrack and thematic resonance within the story, as with the finale, the result is one of the most jawdropping sequences of Japanese animation I’ve seen in some time. It’s awe-inspiring.
Such moments are disappointingly few and far between.
It’s difficult not to look at the issues inherent to this production and imagine a scenario where better scheduling (an issue apparent across the industry) as well as better use CG tools and traditional animation would allow this production to achieve its potential. Similarly, a glance at the sheer scale of how much is being produced makes it hard not to wonder if this is another case where it simply wasn’t possible to make up the shortfall felt in the production.
It feels almost despairing to see this occur for an anime such as this, when the self-expression inherent to both art and jazz are so alike.
Blue Giant is a wonderfully-told story that captures the essence of music and creating art and following your passion. In a healthier production environment, the time necessary to clean this animation would help to bring this story to life in the way it deserves. There is a diamond in the rough, but the animation and production quality of the final product obscure its chance to shine.
I came away desiring to read the manga only because I wish to read the story in its least-compromised form. In the end, Blue Giant is still a good movie. On the whole, I could even recommend it. In a finished state, it could have been an instant classic. At least we can safely say this is one of the best anime soundtracks in some time, right?
Alicia Haddick is a freelance features writer for Crunchyroll. If they aren’t watching anime or way, way too many movies, they’re probably outside taking photos or listening to their favorite idol groups. You can find them sharing their other work on anime, gaming and films and rambling on just about anything over on their Twitter account @socialanigirl, or on Letterboxd.
