"Liz and the Blue Bird” Review
“Liz and the Blue Bird” is a sequel and spinoff to the “Sound! Euphonium” anime series and is directed by Naoko Yamada -whose film repertoire includes “A Silent Voice”, “Tamako Love Story”, and “K-On! The Movie” and she is also known as the showrunner of the series that are associated with the aforementioned movies under Kyoto Animation. After studying and watching her work for the last year and a half, Yamada has become one of my favourite directors and animators ever and I am obsessed with her introspective style. This slightly obscure release became my most anticipated movie of 2018.
You don’t need to have watched Sound! Euphonum to watch this. Liz is a simple standalone story composed with a lot of meticulous parts. The plot follows a highly introverted and awkward oboist named Mizore (Atsumi Tanezaki -a highlight in the series as well as this movie) and an extroverted and sweet flutist Nozomi (Nao Toyama). They play together in their high school ensemble and their goal is to learn this one piece of music that features a conversation between their instruments. The eponymous piece itself tells a story of a girl named Liz whom befriends a Blue Bird, knowing that one day she needs to set the Bird free. It’s a mise en abyme with the two characters in the music representing the main characters’ upcoming graduation. There’s also an extra layer of having almost all of the movie take place in one school with the school becoming a metaphor for a bird cage. Not only do they need to understand the story of the piece they’re performing, they need to understand their feelings for each other before it’s too late.
It becomes immediately apparent in its main opening sequence that the story focuses on body language -something that Yamada’s known for in her storyboarding. The cinematography mixed with Futoshi Nishiya's redesigns of Nikki Asada's original character models give off this highly intimate and almost impressionistic feel. The shots often obscure the characters, and, along with their faces, the camera focuses on their feet and hands. The dialogue is there for exposition sake but the story unfolds through everything that’s not being said.
Akito Matsuda’s eponymous orchestra piece is great and features method performances from the oboist and flute player in the real life recording ensemble. It takes a lot of skill to sound like a real high school ensemble and it was enthralling to listen to the call-and-response between its solo instruments. We get a sense that these characters love playing music at different levels and some players fit better with others during rehearsal. Yota Tsuruoka’s dynamic and often gentle sound direction and Kensuke Ushio’s (aka agraph) experimental score compliments the movie’s, at times, surreal art direction. On the audio side, a lot of the Foley was recorded at the real high school that the high school in the film was based on. And the mixing sounds realistic like the mix in the series. Ushio decided to go with a nontraditional way of scoring the film and used Morton Feldman-esque techniques by incorporating paint blots onto sheet music and forming a lot of the film’s musical ideas around footsteps (some in the tempo of coprime and prime numbers expressed as polyrhythms with slight instances of the footsteps of the main characters syncing up with each other) and other common classroom sounds (chairs moving, beakers clinking, etc.). On the visual side, the animation utilizes water colours and decalcomania in its more abstract and fantastical moments and a lot of extreme close-ups and shallow focus during its grounded moments (something you don’t really see much in animation). Every shot, edit and nervous character tick feels dramatically loaded. Small moments are amplified due to how claustrophobic the setting is and due to the minimalist plot.
The story between Liz and the Bird is written like a story from a children’s book. It works but I found that its dialogue and beats often felt monotonous and a light distraction to its A Plot despite the story being necessary. That being said, I love how vivid the colours were in these scenes and the character designs were fun and storybook-like and it was impossible to not be charmed even though it’s not as cathartic and its moments weren’t as well earned as Mizore’s and Nozomi’s story.
Liz and the Blue Bird is one of the most meticulously crafted movies I’ve ever encountered. It’s ultimately a story about love, and intimacy and can be interpreted through an LGBTQ+ lens. There’s a lot of care put into its visuals and sound design. It’s a beautiful drama about communicating with others -similar to A Silent Voice. The only thing I honestly disliked was the fact that I wasn’t able to see it in theatres.