Watching Blue Period (2024 live-action movie)

Blue Period is a manga series about a person who picked up art in high school and worked really hard to enter an art university. It was adapted into an anime series in 2021 and recently into a live-action movie. I watched the anime as the script was written by Yoshida Reiko, who also wrote the scripts for the Violet Evergarden anime series (TV series and movies). And when I heard that she will be writing the script for the live-action movie, I became interested in watching the movie too. So I brave the hot summer heat to go to the cinema on Saturday, a day after the movie's premiere in Japan.

 

I didn't read the manga, so I am not sure how close the movie is to the manga, but the movie tries to follow the story in the anime series. So much so that I feel a lot of the side characters were present but underused. Their stories were not told due to a lack of time. It was like trying to squeeze 12 anime episodes into 2 hours. I mean, staying true to the story could be good, but at the same time, adaptations need to consider the media. If this was a live-action drama series, I think the side characters would be meaningful, as their stories help to give more flesh and depth to the overall story. But in a 2-hour movie, with their stories untold, they ended up like props.

In the end, it becomes very hard for me to recommend this movie to anyone, unless you are a fan of the actors that appear in this movie. The anime series does a better job at presenting the characters and their stories, and I really recommend that people check it out.

I think the theatre that I went to also knew that this movie is unlikely to be a hit. As this is opening week, the theatre allocated several screenings a day, but at a mid-size screen. Once it goes into the second week, I think there will be at most 2 screenings, or less, per day, at one of the smallest screens there.

 

Oh, this is a quote that I really like.

「特別じゃない。天才にはなれない。やった分しか上手くならない。だったら、だったら、天才と見分けがつかなくなるまでやればいい。」
"I'm not special. I'll never become a genius. I can only get better through practice. I guess... I'll just have to work until you can't tell the difference between me and a genius."

It has a similar ring to a theme in Look Back, where we keep practising the art that we love.