by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Yuu Asakawa, Naoto Fuga, Saki Fujita, Meiko Haigou, Karin Isobe, Yuki Nakashima, Ruriko Noguchi, Asami Shimoda, Reina Ueda
Intro:
It’s cheesy, but so infectious.
Hatsune Miku. CV01. The Vocaloid Beyoncé. The face that launched a thousand VTubers. From legit pop remixes to protest memes to Fortnite, this software mascot turned virtual pop star is as prolific as her fanbase. After a successful (if annoyingly monetised) mobile rhythm game, Hatsune Miku: Colourful Stage!, animation studio P.A. Works (Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms) provide her big-screen debut.
Building from the visual novel-style narrative of the base game, A Miku Who Can’t Sing operates with the (reasonable) assumption that audiences are fully in-the-know about the five teen bands that make up the sizeable main cast. However, aside from some fun slapstick and banter, there’s not much in the way of further development for any of the characters. Nor is there much in the way of easing in newcomers as, while it lays out just enough of the lore to do with digital alternate dimensions made from people’s emotions in the real world to explain what’s needed… eventually, the pacing and quick-cutting between each disparate group can be a bit discombobulating.
Then again, this film isn’t really about any of them. Instead, the focus is on a version of Hatsune Miku (each group has their own genre variant to themselves, because this really is Dance Dance Digimon) that wants to sing for people… but can’t quite reach them. Even outside of the music specifics, her character arc is framed with the emotional truth about the difficulty in trying to reach out to those in need, but failing to get through to them. With the glitchy digital effects surrounding this rogue Miku and the surprisingly devastating emotional reactions from the self-doubting citizens of Shibuya, the impact manages to transcend any degree of unfamiliarity with either the base game or even Miku herself.
Despite the somewhat meandering pace of the film initially, it peaks with the big musical third act, where the melodrama, the soundtrack and animation hit the high notes. P.A. Works, who early on find a way to make a seemingly-standard shot from inside a music shop look interesting, pull out all the stops to create a fantastical experience that amplifies the core idea that music can solve anything. To say nothing of the actual music, combining Vocaloid production and vocals with the human voice cast to create not just bliss, but eclectic bliss. Between the five groups, there’s a decent amount of variety in genre (rock, hip-hop, idol pop, bedroom pop, even musical theatre), and when it all comes together in the final leg, it reaches a similar symphonic harmony as that found in Trolls World Tour, bolstering its sentimental view of all people and all sounds deserving their own place in this world. It’s cheesy, but so infectious.
Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing is a bit clunky to start, but once it truly focuses on its greatest strengths (how it looks and how it sounds), it becomes a work of such communal euphoria that it basically demands viewing with large groups. There’s a bit of real-world context that bites into the well-meaning state of the narrative (it’s essentially the story of an artificial intelligence finding their own voice… and if a combination of the words ‘generative’, ‘scraping’ and/or ‘theft’ are coming to mind from that sentence, you have an idea of how it can come across), but the film itself is just way too earnest for that to be a major issue. It works in the same vein as the spectacle of Japanese idol culture as a whole: An escape from the complicated and oft-depressing trappings of the real world, and a space to just have fun singing along. Empty calories? Sure. But since when is simple joy a bad thing?
