"Sound! Euphonium - Our Promise: A Brand New Day" review

The beauty of band geek drama.

A Japanese Light novel series that has spun off into something of a budding multimedia franchise, including an anime adaptation, a manga adaptation, and most recently, an anime film series, "Sound! Euphonium" follows the Kitauji High School Concert Band Club throughout their lives at school as they follow their musical passions, build new connections with one another and learn about each other and themselves in the process as they gradually move towards their burgeoning adulthood.

The series debuted cinematically last year with the theatrical release of "Liz and the Blue Bird."

Where that film however, served as a solid functional sidestory highlighting the evolving relationship of oboist and flutist Mizore and Nozomi in a coming of age narrative raising questions of growth and association that everybody asks themselves eventually, "Sound! Euphonium - Our Promise: A Brand New Day" is a more traditional adaptation of the series while simultaneously serving as somewhat of a sequel to the year that the franchise has depicted.

The story follows regular protagonist Kumiko, who appeared as a side character in "Liz and the Blue Bird," stepping up her involvement in concert band as a sophomore, with her own former newbie friends finding themselves in a role of mentorship towards the incoming freshmen, with whom they all make a pact, along with their upperclassmen and club advisors to go for gold in regional band competitions, setting up auditions in their band to be based purely on merit rather than seniority.

What results is a school year of clashing personalities striving to do what's best for the band while struggling to grasp that a purely merit based system of recognition isn't quite as romantic in execution as it sounds on paper.

Kyoto Animation's production is as stunning as ever; the entire cast is brought to life through a vibrant artstyle and an attention to detail in animation that can only have been done via some sort of faustian pact.

Every individual character of "Our Promise: A Brand New Day" is brought to life not through unique exaggerations of animation but by the subtleties of body language depicted through it that had to be tedious to replicate for traditional animation on the production end but make for a gorgeous experience.

The film has to provide distant snapshots of a lot of characters that it doesn't really get to explore so being able to effectively use visual language to boil down these students to their basics  goes a long way to making them relatable and endearing as they endeavor to honor their school despite being in competition with one another for the honor of representation.

When the movie works at its best, its like watching a good teen drama that treads lightly on going melodramatic; its cast may be young and still maturing but they're also all endearingly sensible.

"Sound! Euphonium" fans will probably get quite a lot out of the film. If however, you are like me and try to get into it using "Liz and the Blue Bird" as an entry point and frame of reference, you may find the experience lacking, not because it's bad but because the lack of context for where some of the core cast characterization's stem from exacerbates the major flaw of "Our Promise: A Brand New Day," which is that the movie is biting off more than it can possibly chew.

While the movie ultimately does a functional job in presenting a feel good story of passionate kids maturing and learning from one another, celebrating the ability of the human spirit to persevere, even the most well versed of fans may find themselves wishing certain characters and relationships were given more exploration.

Although I don't intend to hold its franchise status against it but I can't let it off the hook when the story serving as its claim to fame appears to be a serialized approach prioritizing intimate depth over a prolonged runtime with its own cinematic debut entry only working because it chose to hone in and explore 2 individual characters in a tightly crafted and edited character study with little fat to trim.

I really wish that I could say I left "Our Promise: A Brand New Day" as satisfied as I was when I left my screening of "Liz and the Blue Bird" but to its credit while it doesn't stand as strongly on its own, it has made me infinitely more curious to look up its source material. Ultimately, isn't that the goal of any franchise adaptation?

6 Ambitious Crescendos out of 10