Overview: When you're a bored teenager looking for thrills, sometimes the only thing you can turn to is rock 'n' roll.

Having no skill, money, or even a full set of drums, a feared trio of high school delinquents nevertheless decide they are destined for musical glory in a quest to impress their only friend, avoid a rival gang, and — most importantly — jam out.

Animated almost entirely by director Kenji Iwaisawa, and featuring a lead performance by Japanese alt-rock legend Shintaro Sakamato, 'On-Gaku: Our Sound' presents a highly original take on the beloved slacker comedy: a lo-fi buddy film with a blaring musical finale that will leave you wanting an immediate encore!

Blu-ray Verdict: In what is, essentially, a quite basically staged, low rent animation, that is light on dialogue and even lighter on background animation, 'On-Gaku: Our Sound' is (quite easily) one of my Top 5 films of 2021 thus far!

With deeply, and penetratively paused breaks aplenty during stages of conversation preserving the feature's spare mood, the crystal clear dialogue exchanges interact with the ranging musical excerpts just perfectly.

Watching along as our, for the most part, expressionless trio stumble into becoming a band, on a whim, forgoing their video games, the film most definitely rides a wave of ranging bouts of percussion and throbbing bass, through to rock (and, at times, folk) guitars expertly.

Ok, sure, and as you might have already guess from the front cover, there are deep nods toward the Beatles, but there are (to my eye, at least) also some loving gestures of respect toward the more visual comedy of days gone by - none more so than Monty Python's brilliant Terry Gilliam.

Instilled with a lot of footage of the trio walking back and forth, up and down, in and out, we watch along as they start off raw, but soon realize that they actually have something as their playing skills drastically improve.

'On-Gaku: Our Sound' isn't a long film at just about an hour or so, but by no means is it a "short" either, so have no fear. Encapsulating all a real life band would go through from band birth to live gig explosion, throughout the musical tone is spot on for what we are witnessing.

In closing, whether it be the even, if not strategically paced flow of the character conversations or the musical thread that stitches the entire film together, 'On-Gaku: Our Sound' is a visual delight and a film for the ages, please believe me.

'On-Gaku: Our Sound' was an official selection at the 2020 Annecy Film Festival, and winner of the Nelvana Grand Prize at the 2019 Ottawa International Animation Festival and was in U.S. theaters on December 11th, 2020. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.78:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Bonus Features of:

- The Making of On-Gaku: Our Sound
- Our Movie: Behind the Scenes
- Live Musical Performance
- On-Gaku (Demo)
- 4 Short Films by Kenji Iwaisawa
- Trailers

Official Trailer [GKIDS]