On-Gaku Our Sound Regular Edition Blu-ray

Director Kenji Iwaisawa and original author Hiroyuki Ohashi bring an animated film to completion after more than seven years of independent production.

Released at Shinjuku Musashinokan and other cinemas in January 2020, On-Gaku drew more than forty thousand viewers and became an unusually large hit for a film on the independent-cinema circuit. It comes to Blu-ray and DVD as a complete version refined from the theatrical release.

Acclaimed at the world's three major animation festivals, it won the Grand Prize in the feature competition at the forty-third Ottawa International Animation Festival. It was only the second Japanese animated film to achieve this distinction, following Masaaki Yuasa's The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl. At the 2020 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, it also won the award for Best Original Music in the feature category, the only Japanese film to receive an award there that year.

Over more than seven years of production, over forty thousand animation drawings were created entirely by hand. Rotoscoping, a technique that traces live-action movement, was used throughout the film. The result was completed through director Kenji Iwaisawa's passion and determination.

The original is Hiroyuki Ohashi's manga On-Gaku: Complete Edition, published by Kanzen. Ohashi is also known for City Lights, published by Kodansha, and Natsu no Te, published by Gentosha. This strange rock tale begins when delinquent students who have never even touched an instrument decide on a whim to form a band.

To dynamically recreate the climactic outdoor-festival sequence, an actual stage was assembled and a live concert was held with musicians and an audience. With every one of its more than forty thousand drawings created by hand over more than seven years, this feature project was unprecedented in an animation industry where divided production work and computer graphics were mainstream. The use of rotoscoping to trace live-action movement gives the characters' actions a raw, lifelike quality.

One summer day, delinquent students who have never touched an instrument start a band on impulse. They draw in other young people inspired by them, and music begins to resonate throughout the town. This regular edition contains the 71-minute film.