Kaoru is a talented young teenager, gifted with a charming voice and a sweet abiity to play the acoustic guitar. She also suffers from a rare skin disease called Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP). People with xeroderma pigmentosum have a defect in the gene that is responsible for repairing cell damage caused by ultraviolet (UV) light. For Kaoru, this means that she must avoid sunlight completely.

Kaoru watches the world from her tinted bedroom window during the days and at night roams around her neighborhood alone. She has never attended school and is incapable of doing a lot of things most teenagers take for granted. She falls in love with a boy named Kouji that doesn’t even know she exist. He often sits at a bus stop in the mornings, that is visible from Kaoru’s window. One day Kaoru see’s Kouji walking down a street at night and she gathers the courage to finally talk to him. Actually, she tackles him from behind and then blurts out her name, her hobbies, favorite fruit, favorite muscian, and the fact that she doesn’t have a boyfriend.

A Song To The Sun is a sweet little film, that surprisingly doesn’t pack the excessive melodrama one would expect from a film centered around a girl with a debilitating disease. The film seems made particularly for teenage folks and mainstream cinema goers, so stylistically you can expect a film similar to Kentaro Otani’s Nana.

The movie does feature a promising JPop singer / actress named Yui, that plays the lead character “Kaoru.” This would have been my first exposure to her and from watching her performance in the movie I would guess she will have a very promising career in film and music. In “A Song To The Sun” Kaoru often goes out by herself at night and performs songs out in the public. The songs would be similar in style to Avril Lavigne if she was performing with just a acoustic guitar. At times to cutesy for me, but nevertheless Yui did have a charming voice, and the ending song was quite moving. Her acting was believable and perhaps more importantly she really seemed to be the character “Kaoru.” Also, it was hard not to be impressed by her beauty. Her co-star, Takashi Tsukamoto, was as impressive playing Kouji. I did remember Takashi Tsukamoto from Battle Royale (he played the boy with the laptop). In retrospect, the amount of Japanese actors/actresses that starred in Battle Royale and then went on to have even bigger careers is mind boggling.

I found the pacing to be very good for a teenage melodrama type of movie. Not exactly fast paced but not deathly slow like Sugar & Spice. The movie felt a lot shorter than its 119 minute runtime and I would guess this would be due to the movie’s ability to draw the viewer in from the get go. A movie like “A Song To The Sun” not only provides for an emotional film going experience, but it sure can make you reassess the severity of problems that you have in your everyday life. Somewhere during the second half of the film, I did start to get nervous that the movie would pile on the excessive melodrama at the end, but fortunately the movie did not. The ending is done with tact and in a realistic manner, which results in a heavier punch by the final scenes of Kaoru’s song being played on the radio.