Blue Giant (2023) - Hard Bop Goes Super Saiyan in the Land of the Rising Sun
Or; Two Jazz Movies On Motivation and Greatness, part 2 of 2 (spoiler-free for this installment)
I.
When preparing to watch a movie about jazz in the 21st century, there are a few questions you should expect it to cover. The biggest one is probably why anyone would play jazz in the first place, particularly since it isn’t especially cool anymore and doesn’t generate much money. Last week, I discussed Whiplash (2014), and the way it approached the question was to present jazz entirely within an institutional framework. The main character comes across as an oversocialized student who wants to play jazz for school, he does whatever his teachers want him to do, and he’s not an especially creative or independent-minded person. In fact, the only person who seems to have any awareness or opinions about non-school jazz is his evil teacher Fletcher, who actually plays at a jam session and makes a passing comment about how he doesn’t like “Starbucks jazz,” showing that he at least thinks for himself and has something of a philosophy despite being a sociopathic lunatic. But since the film so painstakingly instructs us not to like the guy, the only answer to the question of motivation that we seem to get is: striving to be great at jazz is for miserable, mentally ill weirdos. That’s probably why so many jazz musicians and fans find the film annoying and get irritated when people ask them about it.
Blue Giant (2023) is a Japanese animated movie directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa, based on a comic of the same name by Shinichi Ishizuka, and while it also says little directly on the subject of jazz, the manner in which it tells the story comments on the nature of jazz much more successfully than the other film we’ve examined. To be sure, Blue Giant won’t win any points with anyone for its highbrow dialogue and penetrating psychological insights. The story’s main character, Dai Miyamoto, is about unphilosophical as it gets, and the comments that the other characters make about jazz as an art form rarely pass above banality. Tachikawa is an anime director, and he doesn’t work in highbrow faire — his previous projects include the series Death Parade and Mob Psycho 100. And Ishizuka, for his part, has mostly made “slice of life” comics about jazz, with Blue Giant being his first great success. While the comic contains deeper discussion about jazz and music in general, ones that exhibit more than a surface-level awareness of the style, the anime opts to cut these out, probably due to time constraints (Blue Giant is 10 volumes, about 200 pages each), focusing instead on pushing the story forward at a steady pace.
So instead of explaining what jazz is through blathering philosophical or metapolitical discussions, Blue Giant tries to get the point across chiefly through image and sound. One of the major themes of Steam Calliope Scherzos is that critics/intellectuals often give short shrift to art forms that express themselves non-discursively, focusing instead on the elements of art that they consider reducible to language. Critics like to analyze art by writing long, extended discussions on peripherally related matters, typically ideological/psychological in nature, rather than the art itself. Instead of discussing a painting that simply looks good to most people, a critic would prefer to discuss a painting that doesn’t look good to most people but seems philosophically or psychologically interesting for whatever reason. Because of these somewhat misaligned interests of critics/intellectuals, some works of art take on “highbrow” status, while others, “lowbrow,” even though the latter often requires much more discipline and technical sophistication than the former.
All art forms require formal and technical knowledge that the general public doesn’t have, and each art form is often surprisingly isolated from the other; there is no consilience of the arts, and no one individual can master them all. Educated people, however, are all taught from roughly the same curriculum (which of course changes over time), and so the works of art that correspond to that curriculum in that moment will typically get the prestige points, even if the correspondences might be a bit lazy or sloppy. A more competently produced artwork in the lowbrow category won’t accrue that kind of symbolic capital, and so if it can’t win over the masses, it’s at a built-in disadvantage. These considerations are important to keep in mind when we think about jazz, because it’s a style that has shifted about in the public consciousness during the last century from lowbrow to highbrow to middlebrow and back, traversing the spectrum of all possible culturally symbolic associations. We can think of plenty of things to say about jazz, but what if we took the risk of simply presenting it nakedly while discussing it as little as possible? This is what Blue Giant ultimately does.
II.
In three important ways, the fact that Blue Giant is a Japanese cartoon gives it the perfect starting point from which to explore jazz as a musical genre. The first reason builds on my previous point, which is that anime is largely a lowbrow art form, at least from the perspective of the United States (Studio Ghibli films notwithstanding). And this fact carries some value beyond mere novelty, because jazz originally began as a lowbrow art form as well. In Blue Giant, an eighteen-year-old Dai Miyamoto moves to Tokyo in a quest to become the world’s greatest jazz tenor saxophonist, and he quickly forms a trio called “Jass.” The name is a reference to the etymology of “jazz,” which originally came from jasm, meaning “spirit; energy; liveliness; spunk” (it is indeed related to jism, the slang word for semen). It then started being called jas and jass before eventually settling on the name jazz. Though the name of Miyamoto’s band is never discussed in the movie, it’s a significant choice, because it refers back to a time in which jazz was beloved by the masses yet had not gained intellectual respectability. It was about hot, virile intensity, and it carried a name so coarse that some would refuse to even say it aloud. Blue Giant is the story of a teenager who approaches jazz completely unintellectually in the same way that its earliest audiences did, seeing it as a style of music bursting forth with energy and power that come seemingly from nowhere — seeing it, essentially, the way children see an art that no authority figure would ever encourage them to enjoy, like professional wrestling, skateboarding, or a shōnen manga/anime such as Dragonball Z or Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Blue Giant is technically considered a seinen, but its faint resemblance to shōnen at times, with its own (albeit subdued) shōnen clichés, forces the viewer to empty his preconceived ideas about how jazz is some sort of “thinking” music for urban sophisticates.
Secondly, animation itself is a medium that allows for visual concepts that live-action films can’t use. Animation relies on simplified images, since simplification is key to creating the illusion of fluid movement. These simplified images necessitate a compensatory form of visual storytelling that leans toward the overtly expressive rather than the psychologically realistic. A cartoon face can never possess the emotional subtleties of a photographed one, so “method acting” is pretty much impossible to transfer to the cartoon medium. But the expressive qualities that animation facilitates can convey certain concepts and feelings that live action can’t replicate. Animation can invoke raw, primordial, sensory associations, even mythopoeic archetypes (much as puppets and theatrical masks once did during ancient times), letting the viewer seamlessly cross the boundary from the mundane into the supernatural and back. For instance, in a shōnen anime, you’ll sometimes see a character “power up” by changing his appearance. When Goku goes “super saiyan,” weird stuff starts happening. All the rocks surrounding him on the ground start slowly floating upward. Lightning will strike; the color of the sky will change; his hair will turn white-hot blonde; maybe some flashes or orbs of light will start emanating from his body. All of this might seem very childish and adolescent, but then again, the recent Hungarian animated movie Toldi (2022) — an adaptation of the epic poem and canonical literary classic by János Arany — also uses the same “super saiyan” effect, and it works perfectly fine. Blue Giant never lets its characters literally manifest supernatural powers, but it has plenty of visually intense sequences like this that invoke the same feeling, taking advantage of the possibilities inherent to the medium of animation.
Thirdly, the way that Japan has approached jazz has mostly been non-ideological ever since the music first grew in popularity following World War II (there was a brief association between Japanese free jazz and the 1968 student protests, because even Japan did their own little version of the whole ‘68 thing, but it didn’t last long). A 21st century story about jazz centered in Tokyo is thus highly unlikely to use sociopolitical themes as a crutch to make the viewer feel morally compelled to care about jazz in some way, and Blue Giant certainly doesn’t go that route. For any American who wants to understand jazz but doesn’t want to hear a sermon, this could be refreshing. I’ve read a few American jazz musician biographies by now, and one of the major tendences I’ve noticed — particularly in the most recent ones — is for the author to recount the entire reconstruction era, if not the whole history of American slavery, just to establish the neighborhood that a given musician grew up in. Of course, you can’t separate the history of jazz from the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the sheer focus of these books seems like more than mere background information. It seems like the point is to create a moral imperative for caring about jazz, an act of atonement to help a “white ally” establish his anti-racist bona fides. American jazz critics, for their part, have done a lot to drain jazz of its popular relevance for the long-term, even despite trying to do the opposite. The intellectually most respected ones have always insisted adamantly that jazz is essentially “about” something, whether the experience of being black in America (LeRoi Jones, Edward Bland) or participating in a multicultural democracy (Stanley Crouch, Wynton Marsalis). All of this is really quite unfortunate, as the excessive emphasis on slavery, black identity, and/or statecraft only carries the effect of cheapening the music, lending credence to the occasional reactionary accusation that jazz has always been some sort of large-scale government-financed affirmative action project.
Given that Japan aligned itself with Germany in World War II, but then never really had to go through a de-Nazification process half as intense as the one foisted upon the Germans (I guess everyone felt that two atomic bomb explosions were enough), the Japanese quietly accepted liberal democracy but simply feel no need to adopt America’s burgeoning progressive attitude toward race, and thus it never moralized American jazz music. In Europe, which got big into jazz during the late 1960s, their scenes tended to be radically left-wing, as they accepted the notion that playing jazz loudly and annoyingly is inherently an anti-fascist statement. As a result, you had a bunch of musicians with no technical skill blowing their guts out, being as noisy and obnoxious as possible, all because Hitler really would’ve hated that, or something. We ought to be grateful to the Japanese for their interest in jazz, because they represent the only major post-war jazz scene refreshingly free of these hang-ups. The Japanese proved that you can enjoy the music primarily because of its aesthetic value rather than vague ideals like “democracy” and “freedom from oppression” and so forth. With that background, Blue Giant tells us a lot more about jazz by virtue of what it doesn’t say about the music rather than what it does. It presents jazz in an entirely different context, with an entirely different symbolic meaning from what westerners have been accustomed to seeing, especially over the last couple decades.
III.
To be fair to Whiplash, which I reviewed rather critically last week, that movie also downplays the sociopolitical relevance of jazz. And it bears some other correspondences with Blue Giant, as well. The main characters both have a simplistic, unphilosophical attitude towards jazz, and they’re extremely driven to succeed. They both approach jazz as a competition in which one should always strive to achieve greatness. But temperamentally and psychologically, both movies could not be any more different. The original Blue Giant comic was drawn from 2013 to 2016, so it’s highly unlikely that Shinichi Ishizuka was directly commenting upon Whiplash at any point. But it’s interesting nevertheless just how diametrically opposed the two are to each other. I’ll use this section to expound upon the differences.
In Whiplash, the protagonist Andrew Neiman understands jazz entirely within an academic context. His relationship to jazz is bizarre and somewhat contrived, as though everything he knows was taught to him in school. In Blue Giant, Dai Miyamoto’s interest in jazz occurs entirely outside of the school system. He never plays in any school-sponsored jazz orchestras or marching bands, and he has no interest in attending college. We learn this in the movie when he meets Yukinori Sawabe, an arrogant 18-year-old pianist who has been playing since the age of four. When Dai tells him that he has only been playing for a few years, Yukinori is prepared to dismiss him altogether, but Dai impresses Yukinori enough for them to start a band. Dai essentially belongs to the literary and folkloric archetype of the bold and cocky hero who doesn’t have much smarts and whose ignorance empowers him, a common feature of shōnen comics, but also of medieval chivalric romances and European pagan epics.
The comic thoroughly covers Dai’s high school years and shows how he loses interest in playing basketball, acquires his saxophone, and learns to play. He plays for three years alone by a riverbank, and then, following an embarrassing open-mic jam session, he meets a retired musician who is willing to teach him for free. After six grueling months, he’s able to read sheet music and has acquired a good, working understanding of music theory. Although the movie does not cover those formative years, the non-academic quality of Dai’s approach is still clear throughout the film’s presentation, and it informs the manner in which Dai and Yukinori participate within their own community. Dai hands out flyers for shows. They both try to play at jam sessions. Their drummer Tamada sucks, so he takes lessons with little kids while working his way up. As a band, they all try to play gigs at more and more respected clubs. Essentially, they participate in their community rather than a school. Consequently, the movie has a feeling of openness; it breathes in a way that Whiplash doesn’t. This is not an attack on Whiplash necessarily, because that film is supposed to be about the suffocating environment of a prestigious music institution with a psychopath for an instructor. Still, though, you never get the sense that Whiplash really takes place in New York. Blue Giant, by contrast, features the environment of Tokyo so prominently that it’s practically a character in the film.
Some more oppositions. In Whiplash, the outcome of Andrew Nieman is an entirely open question. We don’t know if he’ll succeed, if he’ll fail, if he’ll have a good life, if he’ll be miserable… nothing. That’s a huge part of the ethical ambiguity that the film presents. Blue Giant, however, removes all doubt about Dai’s future as a jazz musician. He will absolutely succeed, and we know this because early on, the movie presents “interview footage” from the other characters who knew him, apparently from an imaginary documentary made in the future. This is a storytelling technique that has irritated some fans and critics, though I think the purpose is to give the viewer/reader the sense that we’re dealing with the boyhood deeds of a great legend, like the kind you find in Irish mythology for heroes such as Cu Chulainn or Finn McCool. The point isn’t to set up the question as to whether he’ll succeed or fail but to try and keep the viewer interested in how he got there.
Whiplash features realistic acting to depict absurd, hyper-exaggerated scenarios. Once again, in Blue Giant, it’s the opposite. Blue Giant can’t have “good acting” by definition since it’s a cartoon, and cartoons aren’t meant to have their acting evaluated according to conventional film standards. The movie does a good job of avoiding needlessly grotesque anime clichés (so, for instance, you won’t see any scenes in which the characters fall down as a punchline, or develop gigantic sweat drops next to their heads), but as stated before, we’re still dealing with expressive storytelling here. Nonetheless, the actual situations the characters find themselves in are quite lifelike and relatable. Occasionally, tensions will rise, but they’ll eventually relax themselves. Every character comes across as psychologically three-dimensional.
In Whiplash, the pursuit of greatness is a horrible, miserable thing, while in Blue Giant, it’s often portrayed as difficult and humbling, but there are always moments of encouragement along the way, ultimately leading the viewer with the message that hard work is worth it. Again, this is much truer to life. The comic book actually manages to present situations in its first few volumes (which the film cuts) that are even more perfectly opposed to what Whiplash portrays. Dai’s music teacher from his hometown drinks too much, seems somewhat miserable, and he’s kind of an asshole. He resembles the sort of competitive teacher with a masculine pedagogy that Whiplash amounts to a heavy-handed critique directed against. He frequently insults Dai, tells him he’s not good enough, makes fun of him, etc. But the occasional muted compliments and other words of encouragement he gives to Dai are just enough to push him onward until it becomes clear that he has grown into an impressive player. When Dai is finally ready to move on, both he and his teacher have reached a common understanding and, at last, strong mutual respect. It’s unfortunate that this relationship is occluded from the film, because it strongly portrays the kind of student/mentor bond that used to be common in western education and artistic pursuits but now seems quite scarce, if not altogether absent outside of sports teams.
Some people will bristle at the fact that Dai wants to be the greatest musician of all time and approaches his craft quite competitively — I’ve already seen some musicians moan online about how upsetting it is to them that Dai and Yukinori don’t merely want to participate in a community and have a fun time expressing themselves through art but instead see it as a competition. But these complaints completely misconstrue the history of jazz, especially bebop, which has always been an intense, competitive art form in which the players (mostly men) are constantly trying to one-up each other. It’s a style of music that combines intellectual discipline with swaggering machismo. This movie is actually quite bold and unconventional in presenting such an attitude to music in largely positive terms, and its message is actually far less commonplace than what we find from Whiplash. It’s a lowbrow message!
IV.
When Dai Miyamoto is asked why he likes jazz, he replies, “It’s just so hot and intense.” That’s about as far as the movie goes when it comes to verbally explaining his motivations. It’s also a pretty accurate depiction of how bad musicians are at explaining what music means to them. Because words often fail to explain what music can convey, Blue Giant relies heavily on images and sounds to do the trick. So, I’ll make a few remarks on both.
Although Blue Giant never has its characters go “super saiyan” in quite the same way that Goku does in Dragonball Z, it still does not skimp on psychedelic effects when each musician plays a solo. Director Yuzuru Tachikawa makes bold use of unconventional camera angles and extreme close-ups, and because he relies on 3D models for the music performance scenes, he’s able to zip the “camera” around and give off the effect of impossibly difficult shots and other feats of cinematography. This is an approach that has badly ruined some anime, like the 2016 Berserk series, which substitutes camera wankery for good storytelling, and admittedly Blue Giant isn’t without its faults vis-à-vis the use of 3D animation (more on that in a second). But the disorienting effect that these psychedelic sequences create during the actual jazz performances works quite well. Colorful notes and squiggled wave lines are seen passing through the unlit body of the saxophone as they travel out the bell of the horn. Drops of sweat are shown up-close as they fall from the faces of the players, jiggling about while refracting light from the stage. Beams of glowing energy emanate from the players’ instruments. A extremely up-close finger in thermal colors strikes a single piano key as the surrounding keys seemingly melt and then curl upwards onto the edges of the screen. Players ascend to the echelons of outer space. Kaleidoscopic swirls of color fill the screen. Dramatic still shots of the club, along with scenes from each players’ memories, are shown in rapid-fire succession. The sound editing, I should add, also complements some of these particular shots quite impressively through the use of reverb and other effects.
All of these animation displays lie somewhere between the “powering up” sequences you’d find in a shōnen anime and the elaborate music visualization screens featured in most computer audio-playing programs. They also do a good job of forcing the viewer to pay attention to what the songs are doing, drawing out the dramatic power of the music in ways that mere “acting” or live-action directing couldn’t accommodate. If there’s a problem with Blue Giant, however, it’s that not all of its use of 3D works. As much as I’d like to rave about how good this movie is, there are admittedly some shots that look like they’re coming from a Playstation 2 video game rather than a work of professional animation, especially when the “camera” does lateral tracking shots overlooking the audience and players in the clubs. Additionally, 3D models are often used to portray the musicians playing their instruments, and they seem to have a faster framerate than what’s going on in the adjacent shots, resulting in the feeling of excessively artificiality. Music performance has always been a highly difficult thing to animate accurately, and Blue Giant tries to be as accurate as it can when directly portraying the fingering on instruments, the motions of the players, and so on. But in this need for mimetic accuracy, there are a few images that don’t quite work.
All the same, these sequences are exactly the sort of thing I’ve wanted to see from animation for quite a while. Walt Disney’s Fantasia came out in 1940, and it set a precedent for what animation could do to aid musical accompaniment. It was schmaltzy at times, and the classical music establishment didn’t care for the conductor Leopold Stokowski’s choice of edits, but it excellently combined one lowbrow artform with another highbrow one. Perhaps the effect was just too jarring at the time for people to accept (it also didn’t help that it bombed due to the European market shutting down for World War II), but since Fantasia, a rather disappointing amount of attempts at musical adaptation have been tried. There have been some good exceptions, like Allegro Non Troppo (1976) and Háry János (1983), but for the most part, nothing, even though some great comic book opera adaptations (including Wagner’s Ring) have been produced by P. Craig Russell. In Blue Giant, one hopes that we might be seeing the catalyst for more animated productions that take advantage of the potential for images to help people focus on music and pay attention to how it works — technically, narratively, and emotively.
V.
As for the actual music in the movie, there are hardly any flaws. The soundtrack is about as professionally handled as possible by the Grammy award-winning jazz pianist Hiromi Uehara, an immensely versatile and skilled player. Some critics have said that it’s the most important part of the movie, and there’s a strong case to be made for that. Hiromi’s recorded albums tend to borrow heavily from different styles of jazz, fusion, funk, progressive rock, and other areas of music, and she’s no stranger at all to electronic instruments. All the more interesting, then, that in addition to composing the entire soundtrack for the movie, she also composed and performed on all of the songs for the main characters’ band Jass, comprising only drums, piano, and tenor sax. Throughout both the comic and the movie, Dai Miyamoto and Yukinori Sawabe make it clear what kind of jazz they prefer: they’re into the hard bop sound of the 1950s and 60s. They’re into Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Hank Mobley, Sonny Stitt, and especially John Coltrane (Hiromi’s band covers his “Impressions” in the opening credits). All four of Hiromi’s compositions for this band carry the flavor of this sort of hard bop, and it’s all the more impressive when you consider that this is not the kind of jazz Hiromi usually makes. But to my ear, these pieces actually sound quite bit like the Japanese jazz of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which the musicians (some of them former free jazz players) started playing a much more fiery and aggressive form of hard bop and modal jazz than Japan had seen up to that point, with extended solos, sprawling track lengths, and, I think, more individuality than before. I’m thinking in particular of musicians like Seiichi Nakamura, Takao Uematsu, Akira Miyazawa, and especially Takeo Moriyama.
One of the most impressive things about Hiromi’s soundtrack is that you’ll see Dai’s band play with a number of various handicaps that prevent their performances from being at 100%, and the soundtrack always matches these handicaps. For instance, when they hire Dai’s friend Tamada as the drummer, he has absolutely no idea how to play drums. After just a few months of practice, they decide to do a gig even though Tamada still has no idea what he’s doing. And as it so happens, when they play, both Yukinori and Dai do perfectly well, but Tamada’s drumming sounds abhorrent. Other scenarios introduce themselves that force the songs to be played unusually, and the soundtrack accommodates all of them without any problems. These scenes aren’t mere displays of skill on the part of Hiromi, however, because they indicate something about the nature of artistry itself. Even when a vision must be compromised in some way due to extenuating circumstances, people who can recognize brilliance will still perceive the seed of its greatness, and thus it won’t matter if its execution is hampered in some minor way. This is a message that the movie doesn’t need to articulate verbally, because it presents it entirely through the sound and storytelling, and the score is an integral part of how it’s conveyed. And although it does occasionally veer a bit towards the mawkish side in its incidental arrangements, the whole soundtrack is still one of the film’s strong points, if not the strongest, as it should be.
Blue Giant is a movie that explains artistic motivation primarily through the art itself. It is a lowbrow anime movie for teenagers with little philosophical depth, literary irony, novelistic pretense, or other qualities most American critics are likely to embrace, it only got a limited theatrical release in America, and yet I think it’s probably one of the best jazz movies of all time. It is the anti-Whiplash. Check it out.