Perfume -- Linear Motor Girl

Although I've loved some of the Pixar films such as "The Incredibles" and "Toy Story", I never had much interest in the two "Cars" movies. But in my last several months in Japan, I did hear a fair bit of excitement in the Japanese media regarding "Cars II" since "Polyrhythm" by Perfume was going to be featured in the movie somehow. I saw the clip on YouTube where the cars got into Tokyo and "Polyrhythm" was playing as background music, and it was perfectly fine. However, just in terms of the title, I kinda wondered whether "Linear Motor Girl" would have been even more appropriate.

My anime buddy was kind enough to give me a copy of "Perfume - Complete Best" from 2006 which included "Linear Motor Girl". When I listened to it for the first time, I hadn't known anything about it, and just assumed it was part and parcel of Perfume's heyday when "Polyrhythm" came out. Actually, it was Perfume's debut single under a major label, Tokuma Japan Communications, coming out in September 2005. It was another peppy tune by the ladies that helped me get through part of the usual slog of translation work.

Listening to the song for the first time didn't key me into the fact that this was the beginning of the trio as a major act, but when I saw the official music video above, I just thought that things seemed a bit different, probably because of the different appearance of one of the trio and the partially hiccupy choreography.

"Linear Motor Girl" was composed and arranged by Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）and written by Kinoko（木の子）. One of the other startling things I found out about it was that it got no higher than No. 99 on Oricon with about 2,600 copies sold. Of course, this was just the beginning of many better things to come for Perfume.

If I'm not mistaken, this is Shimbashi.