Themes: High School Life, Fish Out of Water, Underdogs
Main Cast: Satoshi Tsumabuki
Release Year: 2001
Country: JP
Run Time: 90 minutes
Plot
Can five teenage boys overcome clumsiness, inexperience, and the taunts of their classmates to become a champion team of synchronized swimmers? That's the key question in this comedy from Japan. Suzuki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is an enthusiastic competitive swimmer who is the linchpin of his high school's swim team. However, lately there isn't much of a team to lead -- interest in swimming among the school's male students has dropped to almost zero, with Suzuki being the only one who still shows up for practice. When Sakuma (Kaori Manabe), a beautiful young teacher new to the school, takes over as swim coach, the men's team finds itself with a host of new members, but the new enthusiasm for swimming (and seeing Sakuma in a damp bathing suit) soon wanes when she unveils her dream project -- creating a boy's synchronized swimming team. While Suzuki remains loyal as always, before long only four other students remain to help make Sakuma's dream a reality -- math geek Kanazawa (Kuen Kondo), 98-pound-weakling Ohta (Akifumi Miura), athletically inept Sato (Hiroshi Tamaki), and timid Saotome (Takatoshi Kaneko), who hides the secret of his homosexuality from everyone at the school. Just as the team is starting to take shape, Sakuma is forced to take maternity leave, and with their first major public performance on the horizon, Suzuki and his teammates are driven to take advice wherever they can get it, ranging from a dolphin trainer at a water park to a group of aquatically inclined cross-dressers. By the way, if Kaori Manabe looks especially comfortable performing in a swimsuit, that's to be expected -- in Japan, she's best known as a high-profile bikini model. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
The film was a popular success in Japan, and was nominated for eight prizes at the Japan Academy Prize, winning awards for 'Best Newcomer' and 'Best Music Score'. A spin-off television series entered its third season in 2005.
Suzuki is a high school student who aspires to become a great swimmer, however, he is the only person in the school's swimming team. Soon, a beautiful new swimming teacher starts work at the high school. Dozens of boys decide to join the swimming team, but when they realize that she teaches synchronized swimming, all but Suzuki and four other boys drop out. The teacher soon leaves work on maternity leave, and for some time the team is on hiatus. However, when Suzuki watches a dolphin show he decides to ask the dolphin trainer to be their coach.
The dolphin trainer exploits them as free labour and has no intention of training them, and in an attempt to ditch them, leaves all his cash with them to have to practice "rhythm" using Dance Dance Revolution. When he runs out of gas, he returns to get some money and discovers that they are totally synchronized and doing well with the game. He takes them back and they continue to train. Later, while training in the sea, a tourist with a video camera films them, thinking that they are drowning, and the boys appear on TV. Seeing this, the boys who had quit rejoin, and are taught synchronized swimming by the five boys.
Before the festival, the pool is drained when the water is used to fight a fire, but the neighboring girls school allows them to use their pool. The performance turns out to be a great success.
