On-Gaku: Our Sound (Kenji Iwaisawa, Japan)
A summer day. Three outsider high school students who haven’t touched an instrument in their lives decide to form a band to express their teenage angst and impress girls. Does it matter that Kenji and his friends have never played an instrument before? Of course not – he’s got a guitar at home and his friends have a bass and drums so in the true spirit of punk, with blind confidence and absolutely minimal effort they start to make friends and influence people.
A wildly original, trailblazing anime based on the Manga by Hiroyuki Ohashi, the film’s animation technique evolves as the story does, culminating in a rock ‘n’ roll spectacle for the ears and the eyes.
On-Gaku: Our Sound won Best Feature Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. This screening will be a European Premiere.
This film will be preceded by Kenji Iwaisawa’s short film Fukurai-cho, Tunnel Alley Man.
68 min, 2019
At Rio Cinema book tickets
Fukurai-cho, Tunnel Alley Man (Kenji Iwaisawa, Japan)
What’s that falling from the sky? And what is Tunnel Alley Man plugged into?
2008, 5min
Director’s Biography
Kenji Iwaisawa (born 1981) originally studied feature film production with the director Teruo Ishii, before moving onto animation. His first short film ‘Fukurai-cho, Tunnel Alley Man was completed in 2008. He has worked on several other short films since then. On-Gaku: Our Sound is his first feature which has taken 7 years to reach completion and will be released theatrically in Japan in 2020.
