Girls Meet Jazz!: Swing Girls

Sorry for the delay of updating. Today I would like to introduce to you a movie what it looks like club activities in school. Well, it is not good expression because it depicts a big band jazz as club activities in school at all. But why I said "looks like" is that, although all actress and actor were complete amateurs or almost ones, they practiceed instruments such as sax or trumpet and performed real jazz music in movie. It calls buck fun-filled activities in school-days for audience. This unique movie's name is "Swing Girls"(2004) directed by Shinobu Yaguchi.

Swing Girls

The movie's plot is here: A group of school girls in northern Japan are stuck in class for the summer, where they find nothing interesting. One girl Tomoko encourages her classmate to deliver the lunches for the school brass band cheering for their school baseball team, thereby getting out of the class for a day. Tomoko and her friends realize helping Takuos plan to fight the next big game could get an opportunity for them to skip the math class all summer. Takuo not having enough members to form a brass band decides to make the girls into a big band swing group. Tomoko buys a saxophone and starts to learn on her own. With the help of Takuo, she makes the other girls involved. They start to practice and slowly learn how to play. The Swing Girls are born. (from IMDb)

I found a video what lead us understand the movie's plot. It is without English subtitle but you can see that well.

I put two more videos of playing swing jazz music "Make Her Mine" and "Sing, Sing, Sing" from the film.

Shinobu Yaguchi

The director Shinobu Yaguchi specializes, according to wikipedia, in feel-good "zero to hero" films, where a group of people take up an unlikely activity, face a number of obstacles, but finally succeed. His film "Waterboys"(2001), which depicts a group of teenage boys who seek fame in synchronized swimming, was particularly successful and led to a TV series.

In our commonsense, synchronizes swimming is for girls. Thus the struggle of that for boys led us funny. On the other hand, jazz is basically for mens but some of women and girls prefer to performing jazz for blassband in school class activities. Yaguchi's "Swing Girls" follows the unlikely but fact-based story of a group of girls who perform a traditional swing jazz.

Five Main Charctors

For beggining of firmmaking, he gathered young actresses who had experinence to perform instruments, sax, trumpet or tronbone, in school club activities, however he failed to find main charcters for experiencer of instruments. But he didn't want to firmmake so-called "Ate-Reco". It means like post-recording that actors give a just acting and musicians give a real music performance. Therefore he gave them including complete amateur at all to learn and practice instruments with special training such as a training camp in the real school activities.

This Yaguchi's princple, in my opinion, made some efforts. For actors, it strengthened their sense of unity and solidaritylead and, for audience, it led to feel it as not-artificial story and joy of effort.

In five main charctors, Juri Ueno as Tomoko got huge success and now she is one of the most famous young actress in Japan. Yuta Hiraoka as Takuo, Shihori Kanjiya, and Yuika Motokariya also became popular actor and actress thank to the film.

http://mydramalist.info/dramas/view/736

You can see the film with English subtitle from below YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIkYKZDgsOU&feature=related

In the vicinity of premiere, actors had some live performance or TV appearance for advertisement of the film. You can see that from below YouTube. This video includes some cuts of their special traing. They are so charming! I love them!

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