Movie Review: Liz and the Blue Bird

Liz and the Blue Bird **** / *****

Directed by: Naoko Yamada.

Written by: Reiko Yoshida and Ayano Takeda.

 

Liz and the Blue Bird is a beautiful, sensitive, subtle anime film from director Naoko Yamada, who knows that what seem like tiny problems to adults can mean everything to a teenage girl. The film is about the friendship between Mizore and Nozomi – seniors in high school, who have been friends since they were freshmen, and yet there has always been something unspoken between them. They are in the concert band together – Mizore plays the oboe, and Nozomi plays the flute – and they are given a choice duet together when the band will play Liz and the Blue Bird – a musical piece, based on a story, where a girl named Liz captures and Blue Bird, but eventually realizes she has to let it free – not because she doesn’t love the bird, but because she’s loves the bird so much. Yamada’s film flashes between telling the story of the two high school girls, and telling the story of Liz and the Blue Bird itself.

 

Liz and the Blue Bird is a quiet film – a subtle one. In its own way, it reminded me of Todd Haynes’ Carol, which is all about furtive glances and looks – where the bond between the two characters is unspoken, and almost invisible to those who are not looking for it. Mizore is a painfully shy and awkward girl – she doesn’t really have many friends at school – really any outside of Nozomi – and at the beginning you almost get the feeling that the friendship is almost entirely one sided – that it’s something more in Mizore’s head than reality. Nozomi is popular and outgoing – she is always hanging out with the other flute players (by contrast, Mizore rejects offers to hang out with the other “double reed” players. Over the course of the movie though, the nature of their relationship becomes clearer – we see flashbacks to them as freshmen, and the incident that both sparked their friendship, and the one later in the year that made it awkward for the intervening years.

 

Since I brought up Carol, and was rather cryptic in the last paragraph, you would be forgiven for thinking that the nature of their relationship is sexual – but while there is an undeniable undercurrent of sexuality there, it is completely unspoken in the movie. This is a film about this relationship – which is a very close one – and how the two different characters’ deal with its impending end date. When high school is over, they may well go their separate ways – it happens to all of us, and people who were once our best friends, become virtual strangers over the years. These two girls have an unspoken bond in part because Mizore idolizes Nozomi, and Nozomi likes to be idolized. As long as they are trapped in this school, it can stay that way. But it won’t for long.

 

The film is soft and subtle, both in its themes, and in its animation. It’s hard to convey what this film does without dialogue – and it does it though body language more than anything else. I am frequently amazed when I watched anime, at just how wide ranging its theme can be. In North America, we still basically see animation as for kids – but a film like Liz and the Blue Bird will put most children to sleep (and, be warned, it may even do the same to anime fans – my wife, who has watched more anime than anyone I know was not a fan). But here, while the stakes seem low, they aren’t to the characters – and their world is brought to beautiful like in this underseen, underrated gem.