Liz and the Blue Bird (Yamada Naoko, 2018)
Iwai Shunji's Last Letter wasn't the only tear-jerking teen romance to sneak onto Seattle screens this past week. Yamada Naoko's anime Liz and the Blue Bird, based on a novel called Sound! Euphonium by Takeda Ayano that has already been adapted into two seasons of a TV series and a couple of movies by Ishihara Tatsuya, is playing at the Varsity and the Grand Illusion, where it will be held-over for a couple more shows this coming weekend (the 24th and 25th of November). It's about the relationship between two girls in the school band. Nozomi, a flautist, is lively and gregarious, while the oboist Mizore is shy and withdrawn. After a brief prologue, we follow the two girls on their walk to school for practice on a Sunday morning, Mizore following behind, her gaze, at Nozomi's feet, her legs, and, most of all, her gaily swishing ponytail, brilliantly establishing the obsession that is her crush. The two girls are assigned a duet as a part of the band's end of the year competition, and their negotiating that piece, and their interpretations of the children's story on which it is based, is the vehicle through which the delicate negotiation of teen love and self-actualization will be realized.
More muted and intimate than the other high-quality Japanese animated films that have played here this year, specifically the bombastically inventive Night is Short, Walk on Girl and the generationally-expansive Mirai (coming soon to a multiplex near you), Liz and the Blue Bird is no less breath-taking, both to look at and in narrative. Interspersed throughout the slice of life real-world story are the girls' imagining of the eponymous fairy tale, given a story-book smudginess and an orange and yellow glow that contrasts sharply with the steely blues of the classroom interiors and rainy sidewalks of the city. But most of all it's Yamada's focus on small gestures and behaviors, the way Mizore tugs at her hair when she's nervous, or how the camera, when adopting her point of view, tends to face downwards, like it's afraid to face the world, that marks Liz and the Blue Bird as one of the most keenly observed romances of recent years, animated or otherwise.
Written for Frame.land's Underseen Films of 2018 on December 20, 2018:
Much of Liz and the Blue Bird is familiar. A slice-of-life story of teen romance and coming-of-age mixed with vividly contrasting and whimsical flights of fancy (in this case realized as imaginings of the storybook of the title). What makes it special is Yamada’s specificity in the minor details of characterization and interaction. The way one girl in love is obsessed not just with the object of her affection’s hair, but with the way her pony-tail bobs as she walks to school, oblivious of her own beauty. The expressive power of a slight shift in the eyes, or a movement of the head, these things aren’t unheard of in live-action film, but they’re rare, and even more so in animation, where even the best movies succumb to the desire for spectacle over detail, usually culminating in the end with the abandonment of emotional reality in favor of a chase sequence. The climax of Liz and the Blue Bird comes not with fantasy, or with a mad rush against time, or the conquering of a metaphorical (but animated on-screen as all-too actual) demons, but with the gradual and quiet accumulation of confidence, of self-understanding. Its high point is not chaotic cacophony of images, abstract and/or action-oriented (as in some of the year’s other best animated films, Mirai or Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse), or a triumphant appearance on a grand stage (as in the spiritually similar Linda Linda Linda), but simply a girl playing the oboe (not just with skill, but with feeling) in a high school classroom, her only audience her peers in the orchestra.
Further Thoughts, from August 1, 2019:
Rewatched this after watching the two seasons of Sound! Euphonium, the TV series of which it is a kind of sequel. It isn't necessary of course, and I don't know that the added context makes the movie better, largely because I don't know that the movie can really be improved upon: it's pretty much perfect the way it is. But it is interesting knowing who all the side characters are. The movie now feels like a small part of a much larger world, rather than the story of two specific people.
Its differences from the series are also important. Most obviously in the character design: the kids are stretched out, more angular, and less, well, anime-like (eyes are more naturalistic, skirts are longer). But also in the plotting. The series is built around Kumiko, a first year euphonium player who observes all the kids around her, trying to figure them out and becoming involved in their personal crises, along the way learning about herself as she sees elements of who she is and who she wants to be in other people. The driven trumpet player Reina and the supremely confident third-year euphonist Asuka are her main two objects of obsession. And while neither relationship is explicitly romantic, the undercurrents are there.
Mizore and Nozomi feature in the first half of season 2, in events that are obliquely referenced in Liz and the Blue Bird (which takes place just after the end of that season). Nozomi had quit the band the year before, along with a number of other first year students who wanted to take music more seriously, while the third years simply wanted to goof around. Now that the band has a new teacher and is dedicated to hard work, she tries to rejoin, but is repeatedly rebuffed by Asuka, the vice-president of the band and its spiritual leader. It eventually comes out that Asuka is trying to keep Nozomi away from Mizore, because she believes that Mizore is so upset by Nozomi having left that seeing her will affect her performance, and they need her to be great in order to make it to the national competition. But no one really understands the depths of the supremely affectless Mizore's true feelings. Kumiko comes the closest (it's her the other girls all eventually open up to), finding parallels with her own feelings for Reina and Asuka. Eventually, the girls are reunited, and dedicating her performance to Nozomi, Mizore nails the oboe solo in the competition.
Liz and the Blue Bird then poses somewhat the opposite challenge for Mizore. Rather than reconciling with Nozomi and thus improving her music by being able to play once again with the person she so loves, she must take the next step and get even better by letting that person go. This is also a matter of learning to see herself in another way, not as the lonely girl everyone pities, but as unique and valuable person in her own right. The unrequited nature of her crush reinforces her own lack of confidence, her own worst feelings about herself. The point of view is almost entirely Mizore's: the other girls who were so central to the series recede into the background (Kumiko has almost no lines (maybe none at all) and Reina only shows up to admonish her fellow prodigy for not playing to her true abilities). Rather than have the various emotional struggles of high school filtered through a surrogate sensibility, Liz forces us to occupy the headspace of a single girl, a seriously introverted one who sees the world only in fragments of sound and image (the clopping of shoes, the swish of a pony-tail), and one who, as an artist, is uniquely capable of translating those impressions into musical form. It's a terrifyingly constricted place to be. But we also feel it all so much more when she finally figures herself out, the relief of her confession and the joy and wonder and freedom of her performance.