I had seen Shinobu Yaguchi's Adrenaline Drive about five years ago. Swing Girls is much less frenetic. The film begins with a scene of high school girls, generally distracted, sitting in summer school classes. The effort to deliver lunches to the school band gets undone when the lunches are delivered late and spoiled, causing the band members to get sick. A half-hearted effort by the girls to form a swing band that summer turns into a more serious effort during the school year. The girls are bratty to their parents, teachers and each other, yet find a bond of greater value than designer clothing or immature boyfriends. Of interest is that the girls actually learned to play their own instruments for the film and toured following the release of Swing Girls.

Except for a scene of the girls attacted by a wild boar, shot as a parody of action films with the action frozen while the camera moves around the characters, stylistic flourishes are kept to a minimum. The humor is mostly friendly with scenes of old musical instruments falling apart in the hands of the girls, a scene of a snow fight, and a shot of the girls rushing from railroad tracks to muddy rice fields when they realize a train is right behind them are indicative of this kind of non-aggressive comedy. The recent American films I've seen about high school kids had stories about murder, sex, hate crimes and such. Not to deny that particular reality, but one gets the feeling that it's the only one that Hollywood thinks exists, or that audiences want to see. Swing Girls may not be the truest portrait of Japanese youth, but it allows the girls to be smart and dumb, but mostly show kids actually enjoying their lives.