Look, I’m not trying to be a role model here, I’m just telling you what happened. I saw that there was an anime movie about jazz musicians, and I was intrigued. It’s called BLUE GIANT, and it’s from 2023, directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa (DEATH BILLIARDS), based on a manga by Shinichi Ishizuka, adapted by someone who goes by “NUMBER 8” and served as “editor and story director” for the manga. The studio behind it is called NUT. You can get it on blu-ray and it’s also on Netflix.

It’s about this young guy named Dai Miyamoto (Yuki Yamada, SHOPLIFTERS, GODZILLA MINUS ONE) who’s introduced living out a Bleeding Gums Murphy fantasy, playing saxophone alone, outdoors by a river bank on a snowy night, the sound of the wind and his gasps of breath as prominent as the squawks of his horn. He vows to become the greatest jazz musician in the world, and moves to Tokyo, where he surprises Shunji Tamada (Amane Okayama), an old friend from back home in Sendai, by showing up at his doorstep.

One night he notices a bar called Jazz Take Two, and is surprised to find it quiet inside, just a baseball game on TV. When he asks the owner, Akiko, if there will be a performance tonight she explains that she doesn’t book live acts anymore, but goes to put on a Sonny Stitt record for him. He sees her collection and gasps, “Wow. She believes in jazz.” She’s equally impressed when he compares the song she chose to the rainy weather, since she chose it for that reason, so she recommends another place for him called Jazzspot. And she’ll soon become his benefactor, letting him use her bar as a practice space.

At the other place he sees an act that’s a little on the smooth side, slap bass and wah wah and shit, but he’s in awe of the piano player, Yukinori Sawabe (Shotaro Mamiya), and ends up meeting him afterwards, telling him, “I only heard you play one song, but those crisp low keys… That accurate tempo and rhythm… A melody line unlike any I have heard. It was simply awesome.” He likes the other guys in the band too, but Sawabe disagrees. “Jazz is dying. It’s on the brink of death. If old guys like them use the same old techniques and gloat like it’s real jazz, it’ll keep on dying.”

They both have outsized ambitions. Yukinori wants to “win” the Tokyo scene, Dai wants to “express every feeling, emotion with sound.” When he plays for Yukinori to prove he’s worthy of starting a group, the movie starts dipping into expressionistic filmatism: imagining him playing in other settings, showing him from exaggerated angles, the “camera” rotating and zooming, action lines blasting out from him. Light reflects from his instrument across objects in the room, a glass of water on the bar shakes kinda like it’s JURASSIC PARK. The dinosaur of jazz returning.

They have to learn to play together, and when his passion inspires his roommate Shunji to start learning drums – and they can’t find anyone better – they slowly become a trio. Called, uh… well, they’re called JASS. But anyway.

We get the small time musician life – setting up gigs, passing out flyers, being disappointed when no one shows up, throwing themselves into it anyway, building up a small reputation over time, getting opportunities as powerful industry people learn about them. They dream of playing at “So Blue, the best jazz club in Tokyo” before they turn twenty. An older pro they meet asks if they play “Modal? Cool? Bebop?” and Dai says, “Just everything jazz,” which does not go over well. People are so skeptical of these kids. But then they hear them.

I mean, these guys (especially Dai) are dorks, and I don’t know how seriously we should take their philosophizing about what constitutes true jazz, as naturally talented as they clearly are. But they’re endearing because they’re so sincere about loving this thing that isn’t necessarily considered cool. People in the jazz scene don’t pay attention to them because they’re kids, people outside don’t pay attention to them because they’re obsessed with jazz.

Animation is obviously a great medium for fantasy, but there’s also something I like about using it to pretty authentically depict real, modern settings. Some would ask why not just make it live action, then, and I would say because the very act of translating reality into lines and shapes imbues it with a different kind of magic. This one has some really good urban atmosphere – on top of and under bridges, in parks, on quiet streets at night, in different types of weather, on the subway, in a variety of clubs and bars in different states – open, closed, busy, slow. I mean, this is normal stuff, but to me there’s something really cool about capturing the feeling of being there with only drawings and sound effects.

The story gets more into melodrama as it goes, and I’m all for it. There’s (SPOILER) a hand injury before the big gig, like a sports movie. They play with only sax and drums, which the emcee calls “unprecedented” (I doubt that very much). Then Yukinori limps out with a sling and eye bandage and plays the encore with them one-handed. Beautiful.

The big question about this being a manga adaptation: is it better if you only imagine the music? I think in the very easy to imagine scenario where the music in the movie is mediocre or worse then the answer would be yes. Fortunately they got this lady Hiromi Uehara, not a film composer but a legit jazz musician who performs just as Hiromi. I’m just learning about her now, but she was a piano prodigy who played on stage with Chick Corea once when she was 17, was mentored by Ahmad Jamal at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and became a member of The Stanley Clarke Band. She performed at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony, and last year she did a Tiny Desk Concert (see below – it’s great). Although Dai is the lead character, some of it really hinges on Yukinori’s unique playing, which is provided by Hiromi herself. (Maybe that’s why when NUMBER 8 was asked to write a novelization he decided instead to write companion novel about Yukinori called Piano Man.) The saxophone is played by Tomoaki Baba and the drummer is Shun Ishiwaka. Their casting is honestly more important than the voices.

If you, like me, enjoy listening to this music, the next step is watching the visuals play off of it, trying to match the feverish sound with the editing, camera moves, overlapping dissolves, and increasingly surreal imagery. Like many anime there are closeups of dripping beads of sweat and darting eyes to illustrate intensity. I think they do a good job of visually reflecting the feeling of a solo building and building to a peak. Nowhere on the surface, but somewhere underneath, I think there’s a bit of FANTASIA in this. I enjoyed it. Maybe you would too.