#REVIEW: Rock Music Rules in ON-GAKU: Our Sound Anime Movie

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“#REVIEW: Rock Music Rules in ON-GAKU: Our Sound Anime Movie”

It's 2001 and I'm cocooned in blankets in a dimly lit college dorm, half-conscious and faintly listening to Pink Floyd's “The Wall”, and at some point my third eye opens and I slalom on a psychedelic journey through dimensions of the mind.

Eventually, the prog-rock wears off. I return to Earth. I am normal once again. Ordinary. Decades pass, and I forget that moment of white-hot clarity when music – just the power of beautiful music – reached through my tympanic membrane and brushed divine fingers along the contours of my soul.

I forget that moment until I see it some 20 years later re-envisioned in animated form in the most unlikely of places: a quirky little independent slacker comedy known as ON-GAKU: Our Sound.

Ota and Kenji jam out on bass guitars while Asakura whales on a two piece drum set during an impromptu practice session in a scene from the ON-GAKU: Our Sound theatrical anime film.

Image via GKIDS

The Story

The plot of ON-GAKU: Our Sound follows Kenji, a high school delinquent with a bald head and a blank expression, who spends most of his time hanging out in an abandoned club room at school with his fellow delinquents Ota and Asakura. Shortly after a chance encounter with a bass player and purse-snatcher, Kenji decides that he and his fellow delinquents should form a rock band called Kobujutsu (“Ancient Martial Arts”).

Neither Kenji nor his friends know a thing about musical instruments, but after an impromptu jam session with some “borrowed” equipment from the music club room, Kenji and company discover a passion for rock that grows to be all-consuming — at least until Kenji just as suddenly grows bored and decides to quit the band mere days before a local music festival where they are scheduled to perform.

Throw into the mix a rival gang of delinquents from a neighboring school, a girl classmate whom Kenji secretly wants to impress, and a folk-rock trio with the entirely too similar name of Kobijutsu (“Antique Works of Art”), and you've got a recipe for a comedy about adolescent aspirations and finding one's place in the world through the power of rock music.

In an act of defiance reminiscent of the cover of the London Calling album by the Clash, Kenji smashes his bass guitar to pieces in a scene from the ON-GAKU: Our Sound theatrical anime film.

Image via GKIDS

The Animation

It might not be obvious at first glance because the film looks great, but ON-GAKU: Our Sound took some seven and a half years to produce and was largely animated by the director, Kenji Iwaisawa, with the help of three professional animators and a bunch of people with no previous experience in the animation medium.

How did Iwaisawa and company accomplish this feat? With an animation technique known as rotoscoping, where live-action film is used as the foundation of the animation. Animation buffs may already be familiar with this technique from earlier Disney films such as Snow White or the works of Ralph Bakshi (Fire and Ice, American Pop), and the rotoscoping in these films tend to have a smooth, rounded look.

The visual style of ON-GAKU: Our Sound is very different from these earlier works, though. Even with rotoscoped animation, most of the film has the sort of flat, simplified, low-detail, cartoony aesthetic that you'd expect from a work of TV animation— or at least that's the case until the music is introduced into a scene.

When Kenji and the other musicians of ON-GAKU: Our Sound perform, the animation expands to include greater depth and detail as the power of music literally adds new dimensions to the players' lives and sends them soaring through psychedelic vistas of audio and visual fantasy. It's an outstanding directorial choice, and it elevates the film from a simple slacker comedy to a legitimate work of art.

The Music

ON-GAKU: Our Sound is a love letter to the history of rock and roll, and sharp-eyed viewers will catch some subtle (and not-so-subtle) visual allusions to musical acts as varied in their respective sounds like King Crimson, the Beatles, the Clash, and James Brown.

The soundtrack is equally varied, encompassing examples of different musical styles ranging from doom metal to surf rock, acid rock, and folk music accompanied by an acoustic guitar. And although ON-GAKU: Our Sound is a comedy, it doesn't go for cheap laughs by making the music performed by Kenji and Kobujutsu or Morita and Kobijutsu sound terrible.

All of the music (yes, even the exceedingly simple love ballad by Public Shibata) in the film is beautiful in its own way. Even when Kenji, Ota, and Asakura only have two bass guitars, an incomplete drum set, and a driving beat, there's a feral power in the notes that they play that expands and evolves as the movie continues. ON-GAKU: Our Sound proves that — with enough determination — a person can turn even a basic recorder into the hardest rocking instrument around.

The official movie poster for the GKIDS release of ON-GAKU: Our Sound, featuring the characters of Kenji, Ota, and Asakura accidentally re-creating the iconic cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album while crossing the street carrying their musical instruments. The poster also features a medium close-up image of the trio's faces beneath the movie's logo and director Kenji Iwaisawa's credit.

With a sharp sense of comic timing but a laid-back sense of humor, ON-GAKU: Our Sound is full of well-paced gags, musical interludes, and visually imaginative escapades. It's a great movie for fans of the off-beat. If you ever felt like an awkward, weirdo teenager who didn't quite grasp their place in the world until discovering a passion for art, then ON-GAKU: Our Sound is a film that will sing to your soul.

Every few years a film will come along that will blow your mind and reignite your love for the medium. For me in the year 2021, that film is ON-GAKU: Our Sound: a movie that reverberates with the creators' passions in every frame and with every note of music that is strummed from a bass guitar or blasted from the end of a recorder.

If you love the limitless possibilities presented by music (whether it be rock, folk, punk, rap, or otherwise) and the boundless imagination encapsulated in the worlds of animation, you owe it to yourself to give ON-GAKU: Our Sound a try. The film brought me back to a time when rock and roll set my consciousness alight, and it just may do the same for you.

ON-GAKU: Our Sound is available now in digital and home video formats from GKIDS and can be purchased here.

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

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