Ongaku

- Avantgarde animation style that blows your mind - Alt rock music that's actually really good - Coming of age stories - If you enjoyed one you'd enjoy the other! 

- Similar character designs, especially the facial features (mainly the eyes). - Both anime follow groups of Japanese kids, including delinquents, trying to find meaning in their lives. - They share an offbeat sense of humor, though Mob is a lot more pronounced with its jokes, compared to the dryer humor in Ongaku. - They shift to experimental, abstract animation styles during big emotional moments. 

Both are movies about discovering/playing music, with a buildup into a phenomenal, surreal, and incredibly immersive musical experience. 

Both shows celebrate the raw power of Art Brut, also called Outsider Art. They share a message that not technical perfection makes a work of art great, but the passion and emotion put into it. Both encourage the viewer to believe in their dream of creating art, damn the torpedoes. Ongaku is about music, while for A Japanese Boy Who Draws it is about manga drawing. 

Both have unique art styles / make use of specific animation techniques that wouldn't conventionally be associated with anime. Their simplicity and exaggeration can be comical (in a good way), which also serve to amplify the mastery of certain scenes. Very clearly experienced animators having fun with their craft. Ongaku ("music") and Ping Pong are similar story-wise as well. MCs who are extremely talented but are only temporarily motivated. In Ping Pong there's more character growth, while in Ongaku the way the characters are so shockingly good with barely any practice can be seen as either unconvincing or hilarious. 

While neither have a lot of immediate similarities at a surface level, both were created almost single-handedly by one person and that unwavering sense of love and passion shine through here. Both of these movies could've only turned out the way they did since they had one talented creator behind them and they're better films partially because of that. 

Both of these have a protagonists who keeps going by his own flow, not much bothered by others. Well, also both are bald. 

There's a similar creative madness in these movies, with characters driven by some kind of subconscious longing for something larger than themselves. Both are exploring the experience of catharsis, transcending the known and mundane. 

- Both are stories of high school-aged characters discovering their love for music, and their friendship that changes with making music together - Fantastic soundtrack; Sakamichi is more focused on jazz and Ongaku is more a mix of everything - You see the process of music-making, jam sessions, and bits of history in music throughout history - Sakamichi has more of a romantic element, but both explore the coming-of-age genre