Swing Girls
| Swing Girls | |
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| Directed by | Shinobu Yaguchi |
| Produced by |
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| Screenplay by | Shinobu Yaguchi |
| Starring | |
| Music by |
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| Cinematography | Takahide Shibanushi |
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Production
companies |
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| Distributed by | Toho |
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Release date
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Running time
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105 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Box office | $18.45 million |
Swing Girls (スウィングガールズ Suwingu Gāruzu?) is a Japanese 2004 comedy film directed and co-written by Shinobu Yaguchi, about a group of high school girls who form a big band. The cast includes Yūta Hiraoka, Juri Ueno, Shihori Kanjiya, Yuika Motokariya and Yukari Toyashima. The film ranked 8th at the Japanese box office in 2004, and won seven prizes at the 2005 Japanese Academy Awards, including "Most Popular Film" and "Newcomer of the Year" awards for Yūta Hiraoka and Juri Ueno.
On a hot summer's day, 13 schoolgirls are bored in a remedial math class. One girl, Tomoko, watches the school's brass band leave to perform at a baseball game, but they have forgotten their bento lunches. Tomoko and the other girls persuade their teacher, Mr Ozawa, to let them deliver the lunches. On the train, Tomoko eats a lunch, and the girls fall asleep and miss their stop. By the time they deliver the lunches to the band, they have spoiled, and all 42 band members become sick. Only the cymbal player, Nakamura, whose lunch Tomoko ate, is unaffected.
The next day, Nakamura holds an audition for band replacements. Knowing it was the girls' fault the band became sick, he threatens to turn them in if they don't audition. The girls have no musical experience and clown around with their instruments. As they are eight members short of a brass band, Nakamura decides to turn the girls into a big band and perform swing jazz.
Nakamura trains the girls hard throughout the week. However, on the day before the game, the recovered brass band members return to school and take over the band. The girls are devastated. Tomoko and three other girls get supermarket jobs to earn money for instruments, but lose their wages when they start a fire. The other girls spend their money on designer clothes and run off with the school baseball team. The remaining girls take jobs picking matsutake mushrooms, but they are attacked by a boar; they manage to kill it and claim reward money, as the boar had been destroying crops.
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Wikipedia