Hitting the High Notes
How director Yuzuru Tachikawa captured the passion of the vibrant Tokyo jazz scene in his acclaimed movie, Blue Giant.
In its explosive, almost impressionistic approach to musical sensation and its often-punishing viewpoint of the grit required of artistic success, you couldn’t call Blue Giant short on passion. Adapted from the manga by Shinichi Ishizuka, the high points of Yuzuru Tachikawa’s film elicit the euphoria of live music as it goes on a whirlwind tour of Tokyo’s jazz scene. Musical solos turn into dazzling explosions of color and light, and the sensations and thrill of playing translate into wildly expressive imagery: At one point, a saxophonist hits a perfect note, and for a moment the instrument seems like it stretches into the infinite.
The sax player is Dai Miyamoto, and the film consolidates the manga’s broader arc into a snapshot of his attempts to make it big in Tokyo. After he moves into the city he reunites with an old friend, Shunji, who would later become part of a band together with him and the prodigal pianist Yukinori Sawabe. Speaking to Tachikawa in London, he says he wouldn’t have called himself a jazz enthusiast before he joined the film — now, not unlike Shunji in the film, the bug has got him, too. “The first thing I did when I started making this film was start learning the sax and go to some jazz clubs,” he explains. When pressed on how the saxophone playing was coming along, he elaborates: “So, I went to lessons for two years and I can play some basic pieces,” Tachikawa mused. He adds: “I can’t play the pieces in Blue Giant, they’re
way too hard for me.”
The Joy of Sax
It’s a film that not only engages with the broader emotional requirements of becoming a successful artist but also marvels at technical precision — and to show that, it needed to show the intricacies of the instruments themselves. “Everything I learned was beneficial to the film, because I’d never held a saxophone before,” he says. “I didn’t know if you press here, what happens? I didn’t know how to put my lips around the mouthpiece; absolutely everything I learned from scratch. And I also got some of the team as well to go to a sax lesson just so they could also get a feel for how it’s made.”
Although animating instruments and live musicians at the top of their game is tricky enough, naturalistically portraying amateurs might be even more difficult — one of Blue Giant’s leading trio, the amateur drummer Shunji, was an interesting challenge to get around, if only for the simple fact that the musicians they were using for reference were simply too good at what they do. Tachikawa explains, “The drummer is Shun Ishiwaka; he’s really well known in Japan. Even when he tried to play badly, it was still really good, and I had to keep telling him to do it worse.”
To get a feel for the movements of an amateur, Tachikawa went DIY again: “I went to a drum lesson as well and got a feel for just how bad a beginner it would be, and that was what I was aiming for.” Of course, though, they had some experts playing behind the scenes.
Together, Ishiwaka, saxophonist Tomoaki Baba
and legendary pianist Hiromi Uehara, who also composed the score, played the instruments of each character of the core trio — though Tachikawa noted that they used independent sessions with different artists to use for reference footage. The music was written and recorded first, Tachikawa emphasizing that Uehara was actually “on board from the beginning.”
The sessions in which they recorded the music for the film were separate from the sessions used for animation reference. According to Tachikawa, “They actually tried hard to stay still, so as not to make any noises that might be picked up on the recording, but Dai’s style of playing is very dynamic, and he moves around a lot; it’s very exaggerated movements. So, although I did reference their expressions and the movement of their fingers when they were actually recording the music, the movement comes along later at the animation stage.” For this, Tachikawa had another set of musicians whose sessions performing the pieces were “more about the movement.”In capturing the movements of these players, the animation had to be dynamic itself and required the interweaving of traditional 2D drawings and CG animation. Tachikawa briefly talks about the logistics of it, saying that “the performance spaces are 3D, and so with the camerawork, it would’ve been hard to just have the characters in 2D. So, for those parts, the characters are CG as well.” Tachikawa also mentions the merits of both mediums, in the case of 2D, the potential for exaggerated expressions and deformation of the characters.
The director says deformation and exaggeration stand out about the musical sequences, in addition to the passion and the pace. The film impresses with its attention to technical detail in instrumentation but also the dreamlike expressionism of its musical sequences, as Tachikawa shows what the performers are seeing when they’re in the zone. A lot of what they were seeing — the use of color and flashes of light in corresponding with the sound — might remind some of something like Disney’s Fantasia’s “pure sound” segment.
The director mentions that he did watch Fantasia, as well as a lot of different music animation, but also pointed to older art animation. One particular piece of animation that stood out in his mind when shaping Blue Giant was Norman McLaren’s 1955 short, Blinkity Blank, because of how “it’s not actually animated; he creates colors by scratching film.” Such a form of expression didn’t just have some bearing on Blue Giant, it also held some sway over his other work — the director highlighting his beloved anime TV series Mob Psycho 100 as one example.
Although the film takes place in a Tokyo jazz scene which seems to exist just out of sight, Tachikawa hoped to present jazz as something universal, not simply niche. When thinking about a sequence from the film that stood out to him the most, he cited the performance of “First Note.” The director says it was a definitive point for them “because, to begin with, we didn’t know what Dai’s saxophone playing would sound like, and that was the piece where we worked out, figured out his sound, and came up with that, so it was an important piece.” But it also spoke to that goal for the film. “We wanted to get people listening to jazz and to get people thinking of it as not something slow and boring, but something passionate and emotional,” he says. As Dai and his bandmates play their hearts out, the passion of Blue Giant is infectious — just as much as the catchy rhythms of its music. ◆
‘We wanted to get people listening to jazz and to get people thinking of it as not something slow and boring, but something passionate and emotional.’
- Director Yuzuru Tachikawa
If you were a kid during the 1990s, odds are any mention of X-Men: The Animated Series instantly ignites your brain with that iconic theme song and title sequence. So, the X-Men ’97 revival and continuation of the beloved series that’s arriving on Disney+ this month must include or re-create that experience in some way, right?
Let’s back up! X-Men: The Animated Series was a runaway Saturday morning cartoon hit from the moment it debuted in October 1992 through its 76th and final episode in 1997. Jampacked with stories and relationships developed in the Marvel comic-book series created in 1963 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, X-Men: The Animated Series remains iconic for an entire generation of fans. As ’90s nostalgia grows, along with anticipation for the X-Men’s arrival in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, reviving the series instead of rebooting it seems a natural move.
“It was the concept from the beginning that that we wanted to, to the best of our ability, emulate the OG series,” says Brad Winderbaum, a 15-year Marvel Studios veteran and executive producer on X-Men ’97, which will have a 10-episode first season.
Forever Fans
Immediately on board was Beau DeMayo, a die-hard fan of the original series who is serving as executive producer, showrunner and head writer on the series. DeMayo credits much of the original show’s success to Eric Lewald, who developed the series for TV and served as story editor with his wife, Julia; and Larry Houston, who directed 69 of the show’s 76 episodes. (The Lewalds wrote two books that helped revive interest in the show.) “I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say the Lewalds and Larry Houston are the grandparents of the MCU,” DeMayo says.
The original series thrived despite its extremely tight budget and time constraints by cramming as much story as possible into each episode — an experience that helped audiences overlook some of the seams in the animation work while perfectly capturing the frenetic style that had made X-Men comics so popular.
For DeMayo, however, the real key to the show is in the characters’ relationships and the human drama, rather than the toyetic approach common at the time for animated adventure shows.
“It’s the melodrama,” he says. “We will have the cool powers and villains, but at the end of the day you’re more curious about why Apocalypse rearing his evil head complicates Jean and Scott’s marriage more than you are about what is Apocalypse trying to do and how are they going to beat him."
It’s been fun to bring back the series’ sunny 1990s outlook on mutant-human relations in
our more complicated times, even when it presents problems. DeMayo says the new show doesn’t apologize for being quintessentially ’90s, even when it at times is awkward in ways he generously describes as “cozy.” “Storm will always announce her moves; Rogue is always going to have the therapy metaphor,” he says.
Some characters presented more difficulties than others. Jubilee was especially difficult because young people today don’t act the same as they did in the 1990s, so her character can’t fill the same function. For Beast, DeMayo drew on his experience writing for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and put in placeholders for the character’s scientific jargon. A similar problem emerged for Rogue, whose knack for Southern metaphors and analogies didn’t come as easily to DeMayo.
“Those tend to stop a scene every once in a while for me as I’m writing,” he says. “[She] surprised me not in terms of difficulty, but just her character emerged in Season One in a way that I did not expect when I first conceived of the season.
Bolstering the revival’s credibility with fans is the return of a large portion of the original voice cast, including Cal Dodd as Wolverine, Alison Sealy-Smith as Storm, Lenore Zann as Rogue, Chris Potter as Gambit, George Buza as Beast and Catherine Disher as Jean Grey. (Alyson Court gave up the role of Jubilee beause she thought an Asian actor should voice the character, but Court has other roles in the new version.)
Lead character designer Amelia Vidal says she took advantage of the revival to bring in a full variety of body diversity. “For example, if we take Jean, Rogue, Storm and Jubilee, they all have different body proportions, heights, age, physical builds and posture attitudes,” she says. “[The] X-Men are so different from each other; celebrating those differences makes each character unique and special.”
The look of the show is equally important, and creating something that both evokes the original and meets modern audiences’ expectations requires an approach that director Jake Castorena describes as fresh but familiar.
“It needs to be the show we remember, but it has to be in 4K, because the reality is we’ve learned so much just in the art form of TV animation itself — from what works, what doesn’t work, technical advancements, production advancements, artistic advancements,” he says. “To do the show, verbatim, as it was, it would be difficult to stay relevant.”
That’s where studying the original series and finding out what made it tick helped set a course for the new show’s visuals. “It’s who do you cut to and when,” he says. “Just because Scott is doing team leader [stuff] and he’s saying his thing doesn’t mean we’re not [focusing] on Jean worrying about whatever they’re going through at the moment."
'I think it's very smart to bring this show back to take us back to the core truths about who these characters are, before then seeing how they enter the MCU in a larger capacity.'
— Exec producer and showrunner Beau DeMayo
Although there may be a temptation to limit the animation to evoke the ’90s style, Castorena says it’s more easily achieved with other techniques.
“If we put too many bells and whistles and did all the new fancy things that we can do with technology, it wouldn’t be the show you remember,” he says. The answer was less about technology and more about how the show was storyboarded. “It’s a lot about compositions and lenses, trying to adhere to what was cinematically being done at the time.”That includes some interesting little tricks, Winderbaum says. “Part of the design of the overall look of the show is to create a small video transfer effect over the animation to give it a little bit of that television in the ’90s patina,” he says.
Evoking memory with those techniques also makes it possible to occasionally break the rules and open up the action in ways the original series could not. “We have a strict code of ethics,” says Winderbaum. “But there are specific points where we crack it on purpose for what I think is great dramatic effect.”
Core Truths and the Future
With a second season already on order and the X-Men poised to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe — perhaps as early as this summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine — the future looks bright for the X-Men.
“I think it’s very smart to bring this show back to take us back to the core truths about who these characters are … why we fell in love with them in the first place, before then seeing how they enter the MCU in a larger capacity,” DeMayo says.
But what everyone still wants to know is whether they’ll re-create that opening title sequence and use the original theme song. Winderbaum confirms Larry Houston directed the new show’s opening sequence. Castorena adds: “I feel we’re doing it right. And if you want to do things right, there are just certain things you may or may not have to include."
DeMayo also won’t confirm but gives fans hope: “Everyone knows what that theme means to people, what that main title means to people. And we are big believers over here of not setting ourselves up for failure.” ◆
X-Men 97 will premiere on Disney+ on March 20. A new episode debuts each week.
'It needs to be the show we remember, but the reality is we've learned so much just in the art form of TV animation itself. To do the show, verbatim, as it was, it would be difficult to stay relevant.'
— Director Jake Castorena
Tom McLean is a lifelong X-Men fan and author of Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy from Comics to Screen, published by Sequart.