Who would’ve thought to make a movie about a group of Japanese high school students who get together to form a jazz swing band? Apparently Shinobu Yaguchi did, the director of the movie Swing Girls, a film with warm, fluffy, and comedic layers that give the whimsically surreal story appeal to anyone with an inclination for inspirational feel-good movies. A comedy at heart, the film exhibits a carefree attitude, apparent in it’s lack of effort in the areas of obsessive character development and dogmatic realism. But that does not matter, at least not in this movie. The characters develop their own charm and appeal without the aid of any sort of moving psychologically traumatic past histories, and the actors play well enough to pass as on screen musicians, at least to one who has played piano, drums, orchestral percussion, violin, and cello. In any case, the movie left me with a smile on my face and a musical jig in my heart (or rather, the cerebral mass that conveys emotions that are often thought of as feelings in the heart). And now I want a drum set.