Swing Girls
| Swing Girls | |
|---|---|
| File:Swing Girls film.jpg Swing Girls film poster | |
| Directed by | Shinobu Yaguchi |
| Written by | Junko Yaguchi, Shinobu Yaguchi |
| Produced by | Shintaro Horikawa, Daisuke Sekiguchi |
| Starring | Juri Ueno, Yuta Hiraoka |
Release dates | September 11, 2004 |
Running time | 105 min |
| Language | Japanese |
| Budget | ~ ¥500,000,000 |
Swing Girls is a 2004 comedy film directed by the Japanese filmmaker Shinobu Yaguchi about the efforts of a group of high school girls to form a jazz band.
Swing Girls is set in rural Yamagata prefecture, in northern Japan and the characters often use the local Yamagata-ben dialect for comic effect. The film was a box office success, and ranked 8th at the Japanese box office in 2004.
The cast includes Yuta Hiraoka (Takuo, the leader of the band), Juri Ueno (Tomoko), Shihori Kanjiya (Yoshie), Yuika Motokariya (Sekiguchi) and Yukari Toyashima (Naomi). The actors performed their own music for the film.
Plot
Swing Girls is a feel-good comedy following Yaguchi’s familiar formula of novices starting a new and slightly unusual activity, suffering various problems and set-backs on the way, but finally triumphing in the final reel.
The films starts with a group of girls having to spend their summer vacation in catch-up maths lessons with a boring teacher. One day they are given the chance to escape the lessons by delivering lunch boxes to members of the school's brass band club. When the band members become ill, the girls realise that they can permanently skip maths lessons if they take the place of the sick band members.
The film then follows the various problems and situations they encounter, from exercise regimes, learning to play their instruments, raising money, finding a teacher and entering a local music competition. What started as an excuse to miss lessons becomes a passion, and they finally win glory in the concert hall.
External links
- Swing Girls at IMDb
- Official website (in Japanese)