Anime Review – Blue Giant (2023)

Music plays an important part in my everyday life. I constantly listen to music, when I head to work, do the dishes or even just to relax. It allows me to escape the outside world and get sucked into a world that Is calm but also lively. You could argue I’m scoring my own life by listening to music as the music I choose could reflect how I feel at that moment. Music has the power to transport us to places we could only imagine.

Blue Giant follows Dai Miyamoto an up-and-coming saxophone player who has a love of jazz like no other. He eats, sleeps, and breathes jazz. Dai decides to move from his hometown of Sendai to Tokyo to become the best jazz player in the world. While in Tokyo he forms a 3-piece band and learns what it takes to become the best. From the opening moments, I was enamoured with what I was seeing. There is a shot where Dai is playing his saxophone in the snow and the saxophone has this blue glow. The glow draws your eye to it like seeing the distant light of a lighthouse at sea. This opening image is just visually striking and left such an impression which is only amplified by the rest of the film.

While the story is not deep or overly complex. It makes it up by having strong and layered characters. The main trio have some incredible written dialogue and even though animated characters you connect with them and believe they are real people. What makes them feel so real is the incredible voice acting Yuki Yamada, Shôtarô Mamiya, and Amane Okayama do an immaculate job, as Dai Miyamoto, Yukinori Sawabe and Shunji Tamada respectively.

At its core, this is a film about jazz, and I feel I would be doing this film a disservice by not talking about the music. While your mileage may vary depending on how much you like jazz for me every moment there was a jazz performance, I was nodding away like I was at one of the clubs featured in the film. Japanese jazz composer and pianist Himori created all the music featured in the film and every song is a wonderful and mind-alternating banger.

But I have saved probably the most divisive point till last. That being the animation. All the animation surrounding the jazz performances uses a traditional 2D anime style. When the film heads into performances 3D animation is used. While for some this can be distracting as it is very noticeable there is so much more to both the performances and the film than the 3D animation. There are moments where the film decides to crank everything to 11 and embraces the fact it is animated. There are moments when someone is playing the piano and their hands and keys turn into a rougher sketch style, where the camera flies into Dia’s Saxophone and we see the notes generate inside and fly out.

The film similar to my earlier example transports us to a different world where the visuals are dictated by the music on screen. It leads to a film that is just sublime. The direction by Yuzuru Tachikawa allows the film to soar, his attention to detail is outstanding seeing background characters reappear throughout the film is such a small thing but adds depth to the film.

A character refers to a performance he just witnessed as being “very blue” and to translate that for this review. Blue Giant is a masterpiece. A must-watch for anime fans and casual filmgoers alike.

★★★★★

In cinemas on the 31st January & 1st February 2024 | Yuki Yamada, Shôtarô Mamiya, Amane Okayama | Dir: Yuzuru Tachikawa | Anime Limited