Sound! Euphonium: Ensemble Contest (2023) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sound! Euphonium: Ensemble Contest (2023)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• This film was the first new work in the Hibike! Euphonium series after the Kyoto Animation arson attack, and character designer Masako Ikeda and instrument animation director Hiroyuki Takahashi, two key series staff killed in that attack, are both still credited on it.
• Tsubame's marimba performance was drawn in full animation on ones, entirely by hand with no rotoscoping. For shots looking out from inside the marimba the staff needed a detailed 3DCG model, so they took an actual marimba apart and studied it.
• Instrument animation director Minoru Ota, who took over from longtime series artist Hiroyuki Takahashi, changed the instruments' sparkle from the earlier conceptual beauty to a realistic one, drawing the lines and highlights that objects and people reflected in them create.
• For the film's theme song no retake was ever needed and it was approved on the first take, and its opening a cappella passage and string-led arrangement were ideas from director Tatsuya Ishihara.
• Sound director Yota Tsuruoka asked composer Akito Matsuda for a completely new kind of music to express Kumiko and the others growing toward their third year, but the menu sheet he handed over had only poetic one-liners and the instruction to interpret them freely, so Matsuda struggled greatly.
• The track 'Ensemble no Ikizukai' is deliberately eccentric: the piece is in 4/4 time, yet the first violins play five quarter notes to a bar and the second violins five eighth notes to a bar, each group running on its own time axis.
• The piece Kumiko's wind-and-percussion octet plays, 'Frontline: Youth's Echo', was written to be catchy — bright and cool at first listen for general audiences — and is built like a song, with a B-melody and a chorus.