Swing Girls (Japanese Movie)

It's a sweltering day during summer vacation in a remote town in northeast Japan. The Yamakawa High School brass band climbs aboard a bus, off to provide moral support for their team at a local baseball championship. Thirteen delinquent girls who are stuck in remedial math with Mr. Ozawa (Naoto Takenaka) look out enviously from a classroom window. Tomoko Suzuki (Ueno Juri) notices that the caterer had missed the bus and so the band's lunches were apparently left behind. She gets the bright idea of ditching class and delivering the lunches themselves.

However, the girls' extreme laziness causes the lunches to spoil, and soon nearly the entire brass band gets sick. The remaining member is Takuo (Hiraoka Yuto), who recruits Tomoko's classmate Sekiguchi (Motokariya Yuika) into the band, even though Sekiguchi's musical talents are entirely in question. But Tomoko and the other girls soon follow, partly to get out of math class, and partly because it's their fault that the entire band got sick in the first place. But there's a catch: nobody knows how to play a wind or brass instrument, much to the dismay of Takuo, who proposes that the girls play swing band jazz - and take their act all the way to a battle-of-the-bands finale!

Intense training sessions on school band instruments follow but they face many other challenges: taking on odd jobs so they can buy their own instruments, members dropping out, and a situation involving a wild boar (!). They manage to survive the odds and the remaining girls, who at first have trouble even making a sound, gradually start to play entire melodies. Gradually, what started as a scheme for cutting class gives way to actual enthusiasm for music.

Add the fact that their remedial math teacher turns out to be a jazz enthusiast so he coaches them into some real swing. Excited to see their friends' transformation, the members who left eventually returns and the Swing Girls finally achieve that Big Band sound.