Liz to Aoi Tori

"Liz to Aoi Tori" is essentially a side story to the "Hibike Euphonium" series, and from the very start, it fully embraces that role. Fans of the TV anime will likely find themselves despairing over the limited screen-time of their favorite cast members, inching forward in their seats as Kumiko, Reina, and the rest of the now-second-year ensemble teasingly jump in and out of picture for only moments at a time. This minor frustration will only be temporary, however, as we're forced out of that frame of mind, into the soft, melancholic lens of our focal point in this movie: Mizore. Although this story exists ... in the same music room we've all come to know, it takes on a different hue. Owing in large part to the incredible soundtrack and fresh character designs and art direction, the tone of the movie shifts entirely, transitioning from an inspirational story of motivation and hard work into a deeply somber and introspective world.

The story itself is very simple, examining the relationship of Nozomi and Mizore in their final year in high school. It openly compares the feelings of the two characters with the piece they play, the namesake of the film, and the folktale it was based on. I was originally concerned that the comparison would end up overplayed and come off as forced, but I left pleasantly surprised. The film acknowledges the simplicity and straight-forwardness of the story, but instead of allowing itself to be confined to that, it achieves a level of technical mastery that managed to blow me away, even though I was already plenty used to the historically superb Kyoto Animation and the other wonderful works by director Naoko Yamada before watching it.

The film succeeds on such a level because it allows itself to be a single vignette in the "Hibike" storyline. It's not a story of hard work, a story of competition, or even a story of music. It's a simple story of two characters, and it's precisely because this aspect of it was so intimately understood by the production crew at KyoAni that such a story was allowed to flourish. There is no excess. The film brazenly jumps through time, refusing to linger on anything unnecessary while still allowing the events that clearly happen off-screen to create meaningful depth in the story. We don't focus on what practicing is like. We don't see what the characters do on their weekends. We don't listen to the girls ruminating on their feelings in the comfort of their beds. From the moment we as an audience walk with Mizore onto campus at the beginning to when we exit it at the end, all we see is what's limited to the confines of the school, to the band room and to our two leads, and everything else is left to become a sort of wistful ether that exists on the fringes of our minds. Because what was shown was clearly so carefully chosen, we come to viscerally understand the weight behind every lingering shot. It's an incredibly delicate experience, and one that could've only been realized with production quality of this caliber.

Yamada's quirks as a director have often been the subject of conversation in the anime community, but I believe that this film has been one of the best applications of those idiosyncrasies to date. Her approach to the art of unspoken communication paralleled the film's focus on Mizore, a girl unable to truly express, and at moments even understand, her own feelings. Subtle gestures such as Mizore stroking her hair not only serve to silently convey the cast's thoughts, but end up feeling as if they were sewn into the very plot itself due to how integral of a role they play. The consistent focus on the characters' legs—a mainstay in Yamada's works—mirrors Mizore's own downcast eyes, and the other camera shots always seem to look off to the side, as if shyly avoiding the characters around her. Add to this the introduction of a softer pastel art style, and we see the world brilliantly through the lens of our main characters, creating something amazingly intimate.

The soundtrack and sound direction are, hands down, the shining star of the film. It combines composer Kensuke Ushio's fragmented, minimal approach also found on his work in Yamada's previous film, "Koe no Katachi," with the expertly realized orchestral arrangements that the series is known for. However, gone are the sweeping brass-heavy pieces that complimented Kumiko's role as a main character in the original series. The introduction of the new piece instead turns the focus to the woodwinds. Brass now supports from the background, and the airy voices of woodwind instruments paint the entirety of the film with a wonderful warmth that sets it apart from the main franchise. The parallel stories of Mizore and Nozomi and the girls from the folktale blend masterfully into each other because of this—from the gorgeous bass clarinet adding a sense of comforting security to the cold isolation of a "Koe no Katachi"-styled piano piece casting an ominous tone over the characters—yet the well-timed use of other instruments such as the bassoon add the perfect amount of levity when necessary (the bassoon in particular being used wonderfully to comedic effect when the bassoonists themselves are relevant to the scene), while still staying in line with the overarching thematic style.

That's why this film works. Every aspect of it is fine-tuned to near-uncanny perfection. The psyches of each character are silently brought to the surface through each deliberate animation choice, from Nozomi's eyes darting around the room to Mizore's subconscious trembling. The soundtrack compliments each and every emotional swell—synchronized musical flourishes match footsteps and impeccably timed silences pull us devastatingly close to the most minute of actions. Each background track cuts to the core, yet never accidentally overpowers the gentle art and soft color scheme. Because of this masterful balance, all of the reactions are almost unnaturally natural, seemingly larger than life because of how lifelike they are. This kind of exaggerated humanity is an achievement only possible through the medium of animation, and even then, I have never seen it done quite like this. Although giving a full score seems like it could be a provocative statement for a film focused simply on the minutia of a measly two characters, if this movie isn't considered among the best for the sheer level of craftsmanship that it exhibits, then I really don't know what other film deserves to be.

From the world's most famous female anime director, Yamada Naoko, comes Liz and the Blue Bird. A spinoff movie of Hibike Euphonium, produced under KyoAni.


The movie focuses on two Hibike side characters, Mizore and Nozomi. The story is about their relationship and personal drama, mainly focusing around the ever present music and how it plays a part in their coming-of-age and self-discovery, giving a meaning to their life and the base to their relationship. The movie especially focuses on how hard letting go off something is, and raises the question "are all good things really bound to end?" This is presented in 3 different ... ways. Directly in daily life, inderectly and silently through audiovisual story-telling which is mainly seen via character behavior and expressions, and the third way being the symbolism of Liz/aoi tori.


The music presented is way more impactful -for myself at least- than in the actual Tv series. The art an animation is typical KyoAni for the expectation of the actual monogatari side of the story which is so fluid and gentle it looks almost fragile. Surprisingly beautiful for KyoAni who practically never tries anything new to secure mainstream appeal. Kudos for that.


Basically, this is highly similar to other KyoAni movies. In a way, it's like Tamako Love Story with different approach, but also like Koe no Katachi except this time the other lead characters is not a mary sue. For those who enjoyed these movies for their drama, and found beauty within them, Liz and the Blue Bird is more than recommendable.

It's nearly impossible for someone interested in the anime industry not to have heard of Yamada Naoko. Her personality-focused direction on K-On! is arguably what turned it into a hit and raised it above its contemporaries. More recently, she directed Koe no Katachi, a film that seemed to signal a move into a more art-house style with unusual shot compositions, a minimal soundtrack and a meandering pace. While the film had many flaws, its personal message resonated with a lot of people, further shining a light on Yamada's talent.
With this in mind, it was clear that Liz to Aoi Tori would be well received, even ... from the conceptual level - a down-to-earth, character-driven drama tied to an existing franchise, directed by the person who does that best, with a heaping helping of symbolism. However, in my opinion, the final product can be described as nothing other than a waste of talent.

First of all, the visuals. If KyoAni is known for anything, it's their high quality artwork and animation. However, in this case they're oddly mediocre while acting more flashy than ever. Characters have their hair flap around wildly to show off fluid key animation that everyone knew they were capable of anyway and doesn't add anything to the scene other than a distraction, while the background art consists of uncharacteristically low detail surfaces which seem to have been made completely separate from the foreground objects (and not in a superflat way, there was clearly an effort to portray depth within the frame). The transitions don't guide the viewer's eyes so much as throw them all over the screen, and there's a lot of random cutaways to objects lying around the room or to the side of a character's limb without any real purpose or meaning, not to mention it rarely goes more than two cuts without an obnoxious depth-of-field effect that puts winter's Violet Evergarden to shame.

The plot moves at the slowest of paces, and while that isn't a problem in and of itself, it makes the narrative progress (which is almost exclusively located in the last 20-30 minutes) feel jarring and unearned when it comes. There's a heavy focus on a story which our two main characters are obsessed with and constantly relate themselves to, even though thematically it turns out that the story doesn't fit either of their situations very well, making it feel like wasted time which is especially egregious when coupled with the aforementioned pacing.

On the other hand, the sound design is pretty exceptional (it was directed by Youta Tsuruoka and Kensuke Ushio after all), and I have no complaints regarding it. It really helped sell the reaction to Mizore's performance around the climax and the evocative dreamlike melodies may have been what kept me from completely disliking the film.

All in all, I don't regret watching it but I can't see myself rewatching it or recommending it to anyone. 5/10

A Genuine Masterpiece of Yuri; Or How Shoujo Become Adult

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After international success of "Koe no Katachi" (or, "A Silent Voice,") Naoko Yamada has been regarded as one of leading anime directors. In "Koe no Katachi," Yamada tried to adopt the adolescent's sense of guilt as a main subject and depict how the young overcomes their difficult time of teenage, which was highly reputed both by the folk and by the critics.

As the former work shows, Naoko Yamada tends to depict teenagers' mental conflict, sour-sweet love, and attitudes towards coming future, especially girls. This is true also in the latest featured anime, "Liz to Aoi Tori."

"Liz ... to Aoi Tori" is a kind of spin-off of Kyoto Animation's "Hibike! Euphonium" series. However, though all of characters on the screen are from the TV series, there is no need of watching it before you go to cinemas. Yamada created this movie as a completely independent work.

The protagonist is Mizore, a high-school student and good at playing the oboe. Though she is spending her last year of the school, she have not decided what she will do after graduation. What she always thinks of is Nozomi, her cheerful friend, and, a member of the school band like Mizore is.

For Mizore and Nozomi's final chance of winning the national competition, a coach selects an instrumental composition, 'Liz to Aoi Tori,' which is based on a (fictitious) fairy tale. As the best players of oboe and flute in the club, they starts to practice hard, but it seems that something between them becomes an obstacle to brush up the music, and after realizing that fact the two meet each other in a biology room.

In this work, both Mizore and Nozomi's emotions and standpoints are likened to the characters of the fairy tale, Liz, a lonely girl, and the blue bird, which transforms itself to a girl and starts to live with Liz to heal Liz's sadness. In the end of the tale, the blue bird leaves Liz's house, following Liz's advice. The director, Naoko Yamada, carefully treated this tale and accomplished to make it the framework of the entire anime.

At first, we might consider that Mizore is compared to Liz, for she does not have many friends and tend to bare loneliness. In contrast, Nozomi's gregarious trait easily connects to the cheerful blue bird, which is believed to bring happiness, in our brains.

This assumption leads us to one certain understanding: this movie may be about Yuri or even girls' love between Mizore and Nozomi. True, for Mizore Nozomi is her only friend. Mizore always stands just behind Nozomi and follows her. Such acts reminds us of many Yuri anime/manga.

However, "Liz to Aoi Tori" is not merely a Yuri anime; it depicts how shoujo leave their teenage-like traits, as the blue birds leaves the cage. We cannot deny that "Liz to Aoi Tori" is a masterpiece of the Yuri culture, but this work goes beyond this reputation.

Throughout the story, Yamada rarely depicts landscapes or incidents outside the school. For teenagers, it is school that isolates them from the society; school is the cage. As long as they remain in school, they can be shoujo and avoid from being adult. However, shoujo cannot be shoujo forever, because of request from the world, and of their growing. Someday shoujo will have to fly from the nest. Yamada has already realized it and includes this school - cage metaphor in "Liz to Aoi Tori" to express growing of Mizore and Nozomi after going through their conflicts.

As above, Yamada's ambition easily goes beyond our expectation. What is impressive here is that Kyoto Animation and staffs of "Liz to Aoi Tori" met Yamada's, and our anticipation with highly-refined techniques and unusual talents. Animators succeeded to live up to Yamada's fine direction plans, from where eyes focus to tiny actions of Mizore, which reflects transition of her emotions. Drawings of the fairy tale is also worth mentioning; you might feel as if you were reading an animated picture book.

Music and sound effects are memorable, too. Kensuke Ushio, a composer, again made an unique soundtrack mainly based on notes of piano. Like "Koe no Katachi," Yamada and Ushio used classical piano tunes effectively, which tells us the changes of characters' mind, their maturity and immaturity, and their growing. Sound effects helps such direction using music, so I strongly recommend you to see this work in theater.

With these sophisticated elements, Yamada tried to tell us something important. Back to the theme of this work, the director concisely showed how shoujo open a door to the world, that is, how shoujo leave their young days. As is often the case with Yamada's featured anime, words appeared in her movie are keys. At the beginning of the movie, we see an impressive word: 'disjoint.' Then, Yamada gives us another clue at the end of this work; again she indicates the word 'disjoint' and then she erases a prefix 'dis-.' Paradoxically, by disjointing we can joint; or, by jointing we can disjoint. It will not mean that in order to disjoint we have to joint something in advance; it just implies that jointing and disjointing are supporting each other. Shoujo can be mature women by jointing ties to someone and by disjointing it.

After all, Mizore and Nozomi decided to help each other, though a tragedy has set on. It is that way that they will take to grow up, which indicates us what 'joint' and 'disjoint' mean. Both Mizore and Nozomi are Liz, though the two are also the blue bird. Supporting each other, shoujo will fly to another sky. Naoko Yamada achieved to express it finely. Definitely one of the best anime in 2018.

One week before this film would hit US theaters, I was just learning about it. I saw some artwork from the film and thought, “Huh a music anime film. Oh it is a Hibike side-story. Sounds interesting.” Three days before I’m set to get see the film, videos on YouTube start popping up for the film. One by Lock-kun and the other by Mother’s Basement. Both videos praise the film on all accounts with Lock-kun going as far to say it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever seen. Ok well now the bar is set wayyyyyyyyyyyyy high for this film. I arrive at the theater, sit ... down, and prepare myself to (hopefully) enjoy one and a half hours of this Hibike side story.

I was going to include this one pre-written section to talk about my feelings about the Hibike TV show. However, it isn't needed because it doesn't matter due to what the film ends up showing. You can go into this film 100% ready without seeing the show. Yes it helps connect some dots but honestly the film does such an amazing job relaying the character troubles and interactions. You just understand each character's standing within the cast.

The film is, quite simply, the best animated drama film I've seen thus far. Going into the film I wanted to find every little issue with it due to the hype that Lock-kun and Mother's Basement started perpetuating leading up to its US release. They were though...completely correct. This film is marvelous.

The music and visuals have to be talked about together because, like with the TV show, they are married together. In the film, every scene is perfectly intertwined with visual and acoustic representation. The music dances with the animation all the way through the film; one does not lead the other. The drama (to be more precise melodrama) works because of this marriage. If one of them were over-the-top, I wouldn't be able to take the film seriously. Luckily the film pulls off this balancing act throughout the entire film.

The film tells a dual but interlinked story; one being a following of two members of the high school's concert band and the other being a glance of a townsperson meeting a new friend. The stuff that revolves around the school looks great. It is staple Hibike detail. The stuff that revolves around this picturebook-like story though is amazing. It almost comes off as a Miyazaki-esque looking film which is a huge compliment. The fact that the studio was able to juggle between these two drastically different art styles within the same film is praise worthy. The music performance scenes are also quite the treat for the eyes. One of the scenes in particular takes over 5 minutes to complete and there are no sort of cuts that force you away from the performance. So you are seeing 5 minutes of straight up musical playing animation. It's amazing, all of it.

The music made me cry alright. I haven't cried in a film since I don't know when. The music, working in tandem with the visuals, will pull on your heart strings if you are invested in the characters. From an atheistic standpoint, I loved the music. It fit the setting of the concert band really well and the music was super pleasing to listen to.

The two main characters in the film worked really well for me. They are great friends but they fundamentally misunderstand each other. The idea of having them work together on a duet solo for a song fits perfectly into their final characterization. I was sort of invested in them in the beginning but by the end I was 100% on-board.

As a side note, I thought I would be disappointed with the main cast of the TV show being sidelined but honestly it was for the best. I applaud the studio for sticking to making this film its own thing rather than fanservice in the other characters. The film also completely skipped a pool event. The film is 100% ready to show you a serious film.

My one gripe with the film is that it made the decision to skip over early characterization of the two main characters. You are dropped into the story pretty much at the tail end of their high school life. Since we don't see their freshmen and other earlier years together, I had issues early on getting invested into the characters. However, this is honestly a pretty small gripe in the grand scheme of things.

I don't know what else to really say about this film. The octopus hair wasn't octopusy enough? I left stunned with how much I enjoyed it and even now writing this review I'm still stunned. I don't know when/if I'll watch it again in my life but I'm glad that I got to see it when I did in the theater. You don't have to have seen the TV show to watch this film so you have no excuse. As soon as it comes out on DVD/BD, you must set aside some time to watch this.

Enjoyment: ∞/10
Overall: 9.5/10

Thanks for reading my review! If you liked my writing style, would like to see some other reviews, or just want to talk, please stop by my page!

Sincerely,
Awesome Drummer

Liz to Aoi Tori,

First off, to those not familiar with the series Hibiki Euphorium, the movie can be viewed standalone without any knowledge of the said series, however, knowing the series and the various character in it brings an extra depth and enjoyment when viewing the movie.

The movie deals with the simple yet close relationship between two side characters in the main series and the storybook tale of the affrementioned title of the movie. Mizore is a quiet and shy character who we see in her seemingly daily routine of quietly coming to school early and wait on it's steps for her only friend Nozomi, ... a lively and chipper girl. The way they don't need to talk much to acknowlede the other tells us this is their usual way. Mizore plays the oboe, Nozomi plays the flute, both of them plays an important solo on the school's band.

Nozomi brought along a book that interest Mizore. The book is "Liz and the blue". As Mizore reads the story, she finds herself symphathizing to the lovely but very lonely Liz in the book, especially when Liz grew fond of a pretty blue that suddenly came by.

The movie's main theme about love and about growing up and about the things one must give up especially to those we truly love rings true on how both Mizore and Nozomi interpret the said fairy tail. Both girls are going into their third year and last year of high-school, they've been together for a long time as seen in the flashbacks. Nozomi is the cheerful and popular one, with lots of friends. Mizore, whose very talented in playing the oboe is rather the introvert, wouldnt even bother to help her junior in the club to play their instrument without much prodding. We get to know more of the two with film's leasurely pace and unusually bright but flat artwork while juxtaposing it to Liz's colorful sorta Ghibli-esque watercolor wash. Both of the girls had their peaceful day on the sun, but sadly everything must come to an end like all good fairytale. A precious time in their life's chapter must come to bittersweet conclusion in order to move on to next chapter in their lives, sadly like the blue bird, each have a different path they must fly too. To have the strenght to let go of the other is probably hardest thing one can do. There lies the drama of Liz and the blue bird.

The film's quite different in look and tone of the main series. I for one like the more angular flat design of the film. It presents the characters in a more direct, less enhanced look. There's still the usual quirks by Kyoani and director Yamada in the film like the constant use of rack-focus on the characters close-up face, the quirky running that the girls do... Though I don't see thue usual cutting the characters mouth kind of framing that they used to do.

The film is quite engaging. Some people might get bored at the film's slow pacing and a rather uneventful drama, but the leasurely pace let me breath in more the films atmosphere and setting, it get's me more to emphathize with the movie's two protagonist, as well as showing the series main charcters in a new light.

Once again this film is one of those you either love it or hate it. The points that one considers weakness in the story or plot are also considered it's strenght to some. It's quite hard to point a finger into it's construction without exposing one's bias to either one.

Okay this is a different pace to the series it's spinning off from. The pace is slowing and it has a more washed out water pallet like colour. This is not a detraction, just a note. There is a lot of subtle character development and it's a notably slow paced story. Honestly it's a fantastic art piece, with great score and fantastic art, interesting character design, and intellectually I can see it's honestly a great movie.

That aside, I hated it.

Okay hate is probably a bit strong. I was bored out of my skull. It was an adult interpretation of juvenile ... waffling on a topic. If I was a mid-teen I'd probably think this was deep and resonated well. As a late 40s adult this bored me to tears.

It's one of those shows that I can intellectually see was a good movie, but it just 100% failed to resonate with me in any way shape or form. I am giving it an 8/10 not because I enjoyed it, but because I can see the quality of the work, and why others WOULD enjoy it. It loses points for difference in style from the source material it springs from, where most of the audience that would be directed towards it would come from.

It has been a while since I was awestruck by a movie, and I'm glad that Liz and the Blue Bird provided me the chance to watch such a beautifully made film.

At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to two people, Midore and Nozomi, who are polar opposites yet quite similar. I was confident that the two of them would portray Liz and the Blue Bird, the musical work for which they are both preparing for a competition. However, the beauty of this film lies in the subtleness that subdues itself into the factors that lead to us realizing that Midore and Nozomi ... are both Liz and the Blue Bird. Liz, because they are lonely and, in some ways, fearful of being abandoned. And the Blue Bird, because they realize that no matter how painful the thought is of being left behind, what is important is to move forward.

Throughout the film, I was certain with the fact that Midore (Liz) and Nozomi (the Blue Bird) will only ever encapsulate the personality of the characters they 'play' as in the musical piece they will solo for. However, this was only a shallow perspective of it; this whole time, throughout the first half of the movie, they were both Liz. Both of them were afraid of being left behind by one another. And by the end of film, they both morph beautifully into the Blue Bird, having full confidence, and though bittersweet of the thought of 'leaving', is still keen towards moving forward.

The music that was used in the film was notable, although this was a given considering how the series this film is part of is a band that plays classical pieces. And as someone who is a fan of classical music, I was met with the feeling of familiarity; the emotions that surged through me while listening to the painfully beautiful piece that Midore and Nozomi soloed for tugged at my heart strings. Not only did you feel emotion from the dialogue of the film, but also the words that etched itself in the music they have played. Although not much dialogue was shared between them regarding what they felt about and towards each other (at least, not until the end of the film), the viewers were already provided with the opportunity to understand the feelings they were trying to convey for each other and for themselves.

Although the film focuses on the relationship of Midore and Nozomi, I was very happy to see that it didn't entirely focus on that factor; they also focused on their individual growth, perfectly embodying the story of Liz and the Blue Bird.

As always, KyoAni graces us with another masterpiece. The only thing that saddens me about this whole movie would be the fact that we did not witness the competition they will take part in. Nevertheless, Liz and the Blue Bird will leave you with a feeling of contentment and the understanding of the importance of moving forward.

I'm going to keep this short and simple.

I surprisingly really enjoyed this movie. Yeah I guess you could say its a little bit slow at some parts, but for me that didn't take away from this film. I cant really tell you what exactly I enjoyed about this film, the characters, storyline, the art style, everything just fit in perfectly. It really didn't feel like an hour and 30 minutes, I pretty much flew past this film in no time, and I understood the story. It was just very enjoyable for me to watch and that's why I'm giving it a 10 star rating.

Above all else, no offense but I don't generally like music anime. I think that its exhausting and boring regardless of the amount I attempt to concentrate and watch properly. It's simply not my kind of thing. However, Liz to Aoi Tori became my first music anime that I actually watched until the end without yawning, getting bored or pausing it. Thanks to the fact that it's just a movie, Liz to Aoi Tori is, as I would like to think an incredible anime music movie that indicated how love is like a cage through music.

What I enjoyed the most about this movie is ... the music. In spite of tuning in to relaxing melodies during night time when I hit the sack. It's nice to hear relaxing songs in a movie once in a while. Sort of reminded me of..Uh..Forgot..Disney films? Yeah..I think so. Well, yeah, I also adored the connection between the two main female characters ( Mizore and Nozomi ). Since I'm a Shoujo ai and Yuri lover, I find the vibe going on between them entertaining to watch ( although I wanted their relationship to be more "engaging").

[SPOILER START]
What I hate about this movie is the last scene. Seriously. She just turned and then suddenly the credits started rolling. What the profanity. I swear to the gods that they really were going to kiss. C'mon man, at least let me see them kiss and I'd be happy.
[SPOILER END]

Overall, I enjoyed the movie a lot. I find it relaxing and entertaining at the same time. Kind of reminded me of the old times when I still play piano. Ah, the nostalgia. Anyways, I recommend this to everyone. Not forcing you to watch it, but you should check it out.

Overall rating: 10/10

I enjoyed this film more than the entirety of Hibike! Euphonium, and fully recommend to give it a chance.

It is a beautiful and emotional piece of art.

All elements of the film -- the story, art and sound direction come together beautifully like orchestra music. Nothing in the film is executed at random.

Story and characters: 9/10

... The story is simple and fully contained in the film, although I'd highly recommend to have watched Hibike! Euphonium before giving this film your attention. It adds much to the backstory of the relationship between the main characters, which is the core of the film.

That said, the film should be viewed differently than the anime series, as the overall tone is different (Hibike! has for the most part a casual, fun feel to it, while Liz and the Blue Bird has a more somber, mature feel).

Art and sound: 10/10

The art direction is similar to the series and beautifully executed. There isn't a single scene wasted. The soundtrack matches the scenes and emotion perfectly.

- - -
I highly recommend to give Liz and the Blue Bird a chance if you've already watched Hibike! Euphonium.

I have never cried for as long as i have in a movie ever. Genuinely. There were multiple points in this film where my eyes were stinging after having the tears just set in my eyes for ten minutes as a time. Granted, I was eating a solid burrito with salsa out of my spice tolerance so it seemed logical.

Then I finished eating… I was still crying.

I had intended to watch this film earlier than this, after I had finished the series of Hibike Euphonium. Yet for some reason I put it off. Life seemed busy I suppose. But as my yearning for ... more Naoko Yamada grew mighty and mightier, I had to check it out. For my love of her visions, and my curiosity of her upcoming projects.

My oh my what I was missing.

The aesthetics of the film already clicked with me upon seeing images of it, prior to full viewing. The character designs have this beautiful long and stretched quality. Everyone looks a lot more humanoid but int he best sort of stylised ways. It gives this instant connection and empathy through how soft & emotional the characters appear. Futoshi Nishiya, the character designer, spreads this quality through his other designs such as in The Shape of Voice. Where that same empathy can be felt. There’s an aspect to these designs where they seem like fantastical beings who are somehow only managing to survive. Which fits well with the struggles in this film. The film presentation is also top notch. Manipulating the frequently beautiful techniques of the digital anime medium that KyoAni have perfected over the past decade. The backgrounds have a dynamic form of realistic, apropos of the very grounded human drama whilst not being visually drab.

With all that has been mentioned, character design, backgrounds, and drama, the film begins with these correlating elements to introduce us to the focus of the film. It is with these attributes that create this chilling and delicate human experience that rooted me into this film head first. This is a film that so gorgeously illustrates the struggles to communicate. The interlocking conflicts that build, stemming from this moment, is a beast understandable to myself and many others. I began to really feel sorry in here as I gazed at Mizore’s, the protagonist’s, attempts to bridge and get close to people. It’s this heartbreaking difficulty that you feel as though you also haven’t built up the strength to manage it. Pushing you to be happy for her to maybe even gain the ability to speak and create an understanding between people. It’s something that tussled with me most in this film. Just watching as some characters can’t get people to understand them really shout in my head “I know”.

It’s not just Mizore that is unable to communicate properly. All of the characters are draped in this cover of unclarity which they are attempting to free themselves from and get to doing what they want. This being best communicated through the superb direction work. Naoko Yamada is known to have an infamous interest in the symbolic meaning of legs. With this film rooting that interest to its very core. The cutaways between legs always having something extra to say about the barriers between each character. Legs will even be explicitly shown changing positions as to correlate with the change in situation or role in the scene. Stand out scenes are in the beginning of the film, where there is a lot of fixed shots on legs that expertly communicate the problems our characters face. The confessions of Noizomi also stand out to me, where they effectively convey the change and reflection her character through her change in position. These details are charming with how they add dressing to the cinematography and give you something else to stare at. But ultimately, you grow to find it a very useful tool to understanding and connecting to the film that they become so important to your viewing. And there’s an appropriate amount of thought put into each scene where you can simply focus on legs as the dramatic visual to inform you on the conflict present. Frankly its hard to recall a particularly powerful moment because the imagery is so consistently embedded. But it’s also my first time viewing this film, and since it was quite an emotionally explosive session it’s fine that I didn’t soak up everything.

But I would be remiss if I just kept ogling at legs this whole time. Not that I always could anyway due to my tear stained eyes. My ears were very active throughout this film. The moments of orchestra in the original series always impressed me with how they were able to channel such emotion. Even to change the emotion with the same piece at a different time in the episode. That sense of emotion is ever present here. Especially with the swathes of silence found scattered throughout, the music delivers in portraying the perspectives and struggles of these characters and it really strikes accord with me. Much like it’s their secondary voice that we can maybe understand better than the words that presently escape them. For me at least, I can hear and feel that voice.

That is what truly devastated me at the climax of the film. All of these things unifying in this brilliant moment that was just so beautiful and powerful. It was something I could just understand so instantly. And it was as though the film proved to me at that moment how great it was. Not to say all was only revealed until that moment. But that, the mountain we climbed lead us to a place that was just what the journey was taking us towards. And that it was so satisfying to witness it, and follow everything as we came back down.

I haven’t mentioned it at all but the concept of the musical piece Liz and The Bluebird is also wonderfully integrated into the story. As are the subsequent scenes that bridge between the film. Really it’s something I don’t want to explore here because it is so beautifully put in the film. That is something which must be experienced on your own.

The one thing that doesn’t seem perfectly set with me is the pacing of this film. While I don’t find it an issue, it does have the sense that this is an extended episode of the TV series. Ultimately, I find that nature to the film charming. And if it is a longer TV episode, it is the best episode there is. This is something I’m keen to explore and feel towards upon rewatching. This uncertainty is why I would say the story as being a 9/10 but the film 10/10 overall. It is the immense lack of distaste or disinterest on first viewing that makes me feel so strongly about this film. In terms of firsthand impressions, this film has successfully captured my love. And I applaud it.

Quick things i loved without saying much:
- Reed making is such a cool looking craft and I love how Mizore makes her own.
- Band members hanging in musical groups is super cute and I love to see the little communities formed here.
- Taki-sensei once again giving inadvertent life advice makes me wonder how aware he is of fundamentally changing the lives of these performers haha.

If I am to mention rankings, I don’t know if I would say this is definitely better than The Shape of Voice. But I’m willing to say they’re both equally fantastic and are wonderful benchmarks of Naoko Yamada’s bright and beautiful future as a director. I certainly hope to see her make as many she feels need. But all the more, it is these relatable and touchingly executed stories that invest me in the media of film. And i am always happy to see more.

Thank you KyoAni, may you heal and grow to be stronger than ever before.

Naoko Yamada directs a masterpiece in Liz and the Blue Bird, a beautiful story between two close and longtime friends who run into a hurdle in their relationship and as a result are both forced to take a step back and reexamine their feelings toward each other.

To get this out of the way immediately, the events of this movie take place after the events of the last episode of Hibike! Euphonium Season 2.

You can certainly watch this movie without having seen the Hibike! Euphonium TV animation series beforehand, because it was made to be a standalone spinoff to said anime series, but having done so ... will allow you to quickly get all the things happening in the background so you can focus your attention more on the sad, beautiful, and delicate story this movie has to show.

Now, I'm a huge fan of the Hibike! Euphonium anime series for its inspiring tale of working hard as you reach for your dreams. I particularly liked the club's advisor, Taki-sensei's, blunt and unforgiving attitude towards improvement because honestly, that's the best way to go about in the real world. But I digress. In almost direct contrast to the anime series' focus on music, rehearsals, the ever-present goal of winning that coveted gold at Nationals... this Liz and the Blue Bird spinoff focuses on much more human and close to the heart concepts, such as friendship and learning to see when a relationship is starting to become unhelpful to a person and then taking steps forward to resolve that.

The entirety of the movie's ninety minute runtime leaves little room for any of the familiar scenes in the anime series. Sure, there are a few slice-of-life scenes (an art that KyoAni has perfected) and rehearsals here and there but they definitely take the backseat in this movie. The movie takes place in the same high school and in the same wind ensemble club room that fans of the anime series have grown to be fond of, but the focal point, the viewpoint... the cinematography itself demands that you focus your attention on the two main characters in this movie, Yoroizuka Mizore and Kasaki Nozomi.

Mizore is your quiet and soft-spoken girl who is close friends with Nozomi, your lively and outgoing girl. They are both third-years at high school and members of the wind ensemble club. Both know that this is their last chance to enjoy their youthful and carefree lives before they step out into the unforgiving real world. Luckily, they are both also the aces of the club in their respective instruments so they get a chance to play a critical solo part in the club's upcoming competitions. That's a pretty good way to go out, if I do say so myself. But I feel what I've just said in this paragraph does not do these two's relationship enough justice.

The two of them have been friends since middle school. Nozomi is very introverted Mizore's first friend and definitely holds a special place in her heart. However, this relationship seems hopelessly one-sided as Nozomi, being the outgoing person that she is, views Mizore as simply another friend. Their relationship is made to go a little deeper though when Nozomi invites Mizore to join the wind ensemble club. Eventually, spending time together both in and out of club allows Nozomi to also see that Mizore is a special friend to her. Their relationship then hit a rough spot during their first year in high school but has since been resolved (watch Hibike! Euphonium Season 2 Episodes 1-4 for more details!), but not without leaving behind lasting anxiety and uncertainty in each others' hearts, especially Mizore's. This movie does a stellar job of portraying the two's pure, delicate friendship and how they resolve the aforementioned anxiety and uncertainty by reexamining their relationship.

From the get-go, Liz and the Blue Bird sets very down-to-earth expectations for itself and that never wavers throughout the movie. It doesn't try to be the next big hit in high school romances, or drama, and definitely not in the music genre like its parent story. It is, very roughly summarized, nothing but a story between two close friends who are nearing the end of their high school lives. The movie both begins and ends with a normal, everyday scene of the two of them walking to or from school and engaging in typical youthful conversation, albeit a little less chatty than expected due to the nature of one of them. From an outsider's point of view they would certainly look just like typical best friends in high school..

And this is where this movie's beauty lies hidden. We see as the movie progresses that there is so much more going on between these two seemingly inseparable friends. The movie takes care to use every precious scene with detail and craftsmanship that turns an otherwise stereotypical "hIgH sChOoL" anime movie into a true work of art.

Whether it is Mizore's constant uncertain glances at Nozomi, or in general just how much Nozomi's typical friendly acts and words toward her can turn her blushing red in an instant. Whether it is Nozomi's extroverted-ness shining out as she interacts with everyone. Every single emotion that the two characters feel in this movie get animated with clear distinction. You can physically feel Nozomi's surprise when Mizore asks if she can invite someone else. You can physically feel Mizore's hurting when Nozomi deliberately snobs her. I've read in an interview with Naoko Yamada that she took extra care to make sure not to "disrespect" the two characters' complex emotions and damn did she accomplish that in this movie! Interestingly and as an aside, Yamada showed increased interest in directing Mizore and Nozomi's story way before production and this goes to show how talented, passionate people who like what they are doing can really create the best works.

Probably my favorite part of this movie is just how entrancing the relationship between Mizore and Nozomi is. On one hand, you know they are close friends and that chances are high they will remain so for the rest of their lives. But Mizore's increasing uncertainty toward Nozomi feels like it put their relationship on knife's edge; a bubble that has grown too big. Another big rife in their friendship could very well put it to a irreversible end, but you can feel that Mizore is taking great pains (at least for someone as introverted as her) to make sure it never comes to that point, ignoring everyone else as she only really has eyes for Nozomi. On the other hand, Nozomi is just being her usual outgoing self, confident that Mizore will always look up to her, but even she comes to a point where she realizes just how vast the difference between the two of them really is and makes up her own resolve toward their friendship. At this point I can only say that my number one ship in anime has safely become MizoreXNozomi (friendship ofc) and I really hope things work out well for the two of them going further.

I've been focusing on the two main characters and their story in this review so far because after all, they are the highlight of this movie and imo, where the nail truly hits the coffin. But that is not to say that the other elements of the movie do not deserve mention. In particular, the accompanying soundtrack was really good and silent tracks were used with care in the movie's more emotional scenes. Mizore's oboe explosion at the climax was a thing of beauty to listen to as well. The different artistic style and redesigned characters really help to make this movie feel parallel to the anime series.

Liz and the Blue Bird is not a grand story, and doesn't try nor have to be. It's not a tale between fated lovers, nor a huge chronicle of working hard towards sweet sweet victory. Hell, it's not even a good drama! This movie cannot be viewed with the typical expectations that its genres seem to imply, because it deliberately exists as an independent plot point in the Hibike! Euphonium universe and therefore cannot be viewed like the anime series. I'm sure this movie's events will only get passing mention in the upcoming Chikai no Finale movie or a Season 3 (fingers crossed), and yet they have stuck with me. It's a combination of the pure and delicate love story between Mizore and Nozomi and how they reexamine and advance their relationship forward and the sheer amount of detail and craftsmanship that went into making sure both their emotions got properly expressed and felt on-screen. The sound (as expected from a music-oriented series) and art-house like visual style were the cherries on top.

Liz and the Blue Bird is a must-watch for anime fans period, but even more so for those looking to take a break from all the serious anime that have come out recently. For those that want a work executed to near perfection with skill and craftsmanship only made possible with a dedicated and talented director who respects their characters' humanity and emotions, this movie is right up your alley. People who don't care much about technical stuff and only want good content will still find Mizore and Nozomi's personal story to be a truly moving one, even if the setting seems a bit too ordinary and grounded. Even then, this movie reaches level of detail and craftsmanship seen in few other anime and that alone is enough to warrant me giving it a perfect score.

There are movies that you know are great on first viewing.

But then there are movies that hit you so hard that you cannot wait to watch it again.

Liz and the Blue Bird was that movie for me. It only took a single viewing for me to know that this is easily my favorite movie. This movie is so powerful that a single word appearing on the screen at the beginning and end makes me want to bawl my eyes out. The character animation in particular also stands out to me. I've never seen any other piece of animation that handles facial expressions as well as ... this one.

The score titled Girls, Dance, Staircase is also of note here. It was recorded in the very school that the fictional Kitauji High School is based on, and it really shows. Each footstep taken is planned out as part of the music, almost making it seem like a dance of sorts. This is best exemplified in the 8 minute near-silent intro of the two girls just walking to their classroom.

The pacing is broken up by the fairy tale of Liz and the Blue Bird as Mizore reads the story over the course of the film. These segments are reminiscent of watercolor paintings and it helps to change up the setting every now and then, as the rest of the movie takes place entirely within the high school. The choice to cast the same voice actress as Liz as well as the Blue Bird (in both the sub and the dub) is an interesting one, and I think it helps add to the more whimsical feeling these segments have.

Naoko Yamada has very quickly become my favorite director, but only one of her films is separate from other series. A Silent Voice is the one most people know, but it is actually my least favorite of hers. If you enjoyed that, I implore you to give Liz and the Blue Bird a try. It can be viewed without watching the show it is tied to as the two leads are only side characters in the show.

[lifted from my letterboxd review]

This movie starts out slow, not unlike most great anime movies, In This Corner of the World, Wolf Children, A Silent Voice. And the movie rewards you for your patience.

The composition of the plot is clever. Little by little, you understand the slow build up in the beginning. It is clear to you why each scene, unimportant to you as you had watched it, was actually crucial in shaping how you viewed each character, and how you view that character now, and why that scene you thought was pointless has made the tension of the plot, the depth of the characters, so visceral to you now.

Of ... course, not all questions are answered. Maybe some will be unhappy about this, but those people will also have been unhappy about Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, right? At the end of the day, this anime is about human interactions. And this anime has succeeded in portraying what is perhaps one of the most sophisticated relationships, complete with emotion and desires, in anime movie history. And it has succeeded in making the viewer, walking away from that cinema, feel all of those emotions for himself (herself).

To top it off, the music and art are beautiful, especially in a show where music is not just BGM but also an integral element of the plot. You wouldn't expect any less from Kyoto Animation.

Read on for my more thorough critique, but with spoilers.

I thought it was clever. Of course, the movie was very slow to start. And then, I found myself thinking that it was going too fast. All of a sudden, Yoroizuka had become super expressive, which I didn’t expect. When she stepped up to hug Nozomi, I didn’t see that coming, and couldn’t help but think that they were rushing the plot. But in general, the evolution of Yoroizuka, and the whole relationship, was clever. As I said previously, it certainly is the case that some of the unspeakable frustrations that manifested in the earlier scenes proved invaluable in characterizing and evolving the relationship.

I was confused by the birds. At the beginning, I knew that the movie was trying to tell me one was Yoroizuka and one was Nozomi, but I honestly couldn’t figure out which was which. Was Nozomi actually like the blue bird at the start? That was kind of a stretch, and both characters were already far more fleshed out to me than Liz and the bird, so I couldn’t strongly feel that the movie had intended Yoroizuka to seem like Liz at the beginning. Of course, I realized that that was the metaphor some time early enough for me to see that the movie was using this clever twist, but unfortunately it just wasn’t clever enough (or wasn’t executed well enough) to make me fall for it early on. (Not sure if everyone feels this way, but my guess is that most people would be somewhat confused at the beginning.)

Perhaps one more nitpick is that I don’t feel the orchestra motif working very well anymore. Sigh, it’s amazing music, and it is clear, but it is like a little too clear. It’s somewhat annoying when you’re doing so well with these scenes of unspoken tension, interspersed with the awkward cuteness of that girl whose name I don’t think I ever bothered to learn, and then you have this cheap orchestra scene where you need the guest teachers to tell you that your two characters have a problem they need to sort out. And that the precise problem they're facing is strongly characterized in their music.

So I felt these things were weak, but then again, I think I can overlook them because it’s a movie about emotions and relationship, and it doesn’t have to answer all my questions about the technical aspects of the plot. At the end of the day, there are some solid emotions there, oozing out of the screen, even. And a complex, difficult to portray relationship between two girls was fairly successfully portrayed. That’s nice.

The complexity of co-dependency and separation through time...

Liz to Aoi Tori being set after Hibike Euphonium's second season, most notably the biggest clue of that being that Yuuko is now president of the club instead of Asuka Tanaka. Anyways Liz to Aoi Tori looks more in depth to the struggling relationship between the silent stoic introvert Mizore Yoroizuka voiced by Atsumi Tanezaki to the talkative genki extroverted Nozomi Kasaki voiced by Nao Touyama.

Liz to Aoi Tori's major focus is on the relationship between the lead oboist Mizroe and the ace flute player Nozomi, however there is a little subplot referencing to the title of the ... movie itself, "Liz to Aoi Tori", told periodically throughout the movie about Liz, a baker and friend to all animals, where she befriends an injured blue bird that can transform into a human and nurses her back to health, but when the time comes for Liz to give up on the blue bird and allow the blue bird to be free, Liz reluctantly has a choice of keeping her caged forever to let her be free. This story told like a children picture book both in it's tone and animation reflect similarly to Mizore and Nozomi's relationship as coincidentally they have a duet together about this story and they struggle to be sync with one another as a result.

Both Nozomi and Mizore being the focus quite obviously gets development together as they're relationship grows more and more distant as they pick their careers and or schools they want to also being VERY similar to a similar incident between them during the second season of Hibike Euphonium with how Nozomi pushes Mizore away with her trying to quit the club, only this time in this movie it's Nozomi's choice of schools. Liz to Aoi Tori takes a rather harsh look at the co-dependency and separation and how it effects a relationship such as this, with two characters with vastly differing personalities and attitudes and how they cope with it, whether be it ignoring it or trying to improve the situation at hand.

So it comes to the point of...who's Liz and who's the blue bird?...

Liz to Aoi Tori's animation done by Kyoto Animation takes a differing approach to it's animation, not like it's anime series, the animation has a much more loose style in comparison to the more bold and detailed animation of the anime series but still as expressive in it's facial features as ever along with the beautiful backgrounds especially with it's pastel picture book like backgrounding to it's story of Liz to Aoi Tori but also it's detailed instruments with their polished look it has, to be expected from Kyoto Animation. Now the change of style is due to Futoshi Nishiya, the character designer for Free!, Hyouka and animation director of K-On! along with Futoshi is Naoko Yamada, the director who also directed in other Kyoto Ani works like K-On! as director and an Episode Director and Series Production Director of Hibike Euphonium, so they know their stuff. Nonetheless be it the animation change or not, the animation looks amazing with the special note once again by the expressive animation it has going for it makes the movie beautiful to watch even if it's a bit loose in it's style.

Voice work, well being a HUGE fan of Nao Touyama, knowing LA, ya...LA easily gives MVP to Nao Touyama for her performance, BUT LA will give major props to Atsumi Tanezaki as Mizore, sure she's voicing a rather silent and non-talkative character but nonetheless, in the little sounds, differing cadence, they make to make Mizore more believable kinda makes up for it, in voicing a character that's trying to open up but struggles to do so. With the returning Hibike Euphonium cast back together (well besides Saori Hayami, Minori Chihara and Minako Kotobuki), the voice cast is nonetheless amazing, with special mention going to Chika Anzai as Reina Kousaka. But not only that Miyu Honda who voiced BOTH Liz and the Blue Bird character, did rather well and considering she was 13 at the time, LA couldn't tell especially with her voicing Liz!.

So with soo much praise LA put on Liz to Aoi Tori, is there any flaws that LA found?, well pacing and how there is ALOT of silent lingering moments within the movie, some might say the pacing is rushed, some might say it's too slow, LA thought it was actually decent in it's pacing, sure it can actually become too slow with the silent lingering moments not helping matters, but LA doesn't see it as rushed either, as Liz to Aoi Tori takes it's time in spreading out both Mizore and Nozomi's plotline as well as Liz to Aoi Tori's plotline sparingly and all under 90 minutes no less. LA thinks it was "just" right in it's pacing, maybe the lingering moments were maybe a bit too long at times but nothing to rage about, it's suppose to a calming movie with some dramatic tension. The only other flaw that people might say about Liz to Aoi Tori is our main duo, Mizore and Nozomi themselves being bland....well to that LA might as well say...did you watch the movie?, they develop as characters, they might not talk about it, but the subtle changes in their behavior and their actions do the development as they break out of their archetypal characters which is even further backed up by how the story of Liz to Aoi Tori applies to Mizore and Nozomi near the end of the movie as well. To those people saying that they were bland minor characters given the limelight and they DIDN'T develop throughout this movie, they are kidding themselves.

Why is LA defending Mizore and Nozomi?, well LA was more intrigued by these two characters in the second season of Hibike Euphonium and seeing them have the majority of the focus and development in this movie was something LA wanted to know more about them and LA was more than satisfied by this.

Liz to Aoi Tori is more or less a brilliant addition to the Hibike Euphonium franchise and looking in depth into once minor characters that had some development in it's second season to being the main focus and brilliantly executing it's themes of co-dependency and separation of a relationship and implementing the "show don't tell" all at the same time, stylistically expressive animation and an amazing voice cast. Liz to Aoi Tori is an amazing movie to say the least and was wholly satisfied.

Liz to Aoi Tori’s as good a sequel to Hibike Euphonium as I can hope to expect, and clearly they weren’t slacking off, much like the rest of the series, it’s got a rather simple story, but makes up for it with some outstanding animation, character, and direction, also this time around the main character is Mizore, the oboe player you forgot existed.

I should probably talk about Mizore a bit since she’s the main character now and all, and to describe her briefly, she’s socially retarded – doesn’t talk much, too attached to her one friend, Nozomi, can’t really make decisions, and everyone else ... thinks this is because she doesn’t like them. Ultimately, she is socially retarded, not for the purpose of comedy or moe (as is the case with Tomoko, Hitori Bocchi, Mikuru, or basically any other anime character), but because it is an integral part of her as a person. It is certainly more believable than the listed examples, and she is a compelling character for this reason, since the story is primarily about having to make a difficult decision, and the manner in which this person who has to decide for herself for once rather than just going with what Nozomi wants since that’s no longer a viable option, maybe I’m biased towards her since she’s almost an exact replica of how I behaved in high school, but biased as my reasoning may be, she is a splendidly written character. Considering that Kumiko does share a fair number of her aforementioned traits, I have to say that Mizore is the one I much preferred, maybe because making a ‘gweh’ every time you’re uncomfortable prevents them from displaying serious emotion from the character in the same way, and perhaps more importantly, proxemics. I’ll try and keep the comparisons to a minimum, but it is certainly something to consider, Reina seems to really enjoy violating Kumiko’s personal space, very much of the time, for very little reason, whereas Mizore is more or less entirely physically distant from everyone else, her and Nozomi are only seen close to each other during intimate moments, which by extension, gives them more weight.

I mentioned direction earlier, which proxemics is a part of, so I should expand on that, the animation’s as good as the standard that Hibike already set, even if a little different, I wouldn’t say it looks any better or worse than the previous titles, nor do I particularly see much of a thematic or symbolic change either, perhaps it was just to make it unique for its own sake, which there’s nothing wrong with, only other thing to add is Reina looks remarkably like Mio Akiyama now, and also there is one scene in which she confronts Mizore, but apologises after going too far, which I considered to be out of character, but maybe that’s the reason why the art’s different, it’s from Mizore’s perspective, sort of like that one scene in Pulp Fiction where when it’s from Jules’ perspective the dialogue’s slightly different.
More generally, the usage of visuals and cinematography is top notch, lots of close ups, long takes and POVs which creates a very personal feel, and one thing I really appreciated is how there was still action going on when they decided to show action during the intertitle, minor as it may be, never really liked how most the time they have to stop everything to show you a blank screen for the intertitle, it’s called a movie, I’m here to watch shit moving. Furthermore, the soundtrack was quality as well, in particular, how a lot of the time it wasn’t there, which may seem like a backwards thing to be praising for a series that is about music, but I can appreciate a director who understands that there are some scenes where the addition of music would only harm the overall experience, and given the nature of most of Mizore’s interactions, there are quite a lot of them, that isn’t to say there’s no music at all, they still end up performing, and it’s as good as ever, albeit if your interest is music first, characters second, then you would be better off with another Hibike title.

Ultimately, Liz to Aoi Tori is a refinement of the Hibike formula, it detracts from the musical side of things, replaces its main characters who were already well written and produces even better ones, beyond the fact that I think the story of Liz and the Blue Bird (a fairytale that is a metaphor for the main characters) gets a little more screentime than is really necessary, and there were one or two instances of symbolism that I felt were a bit lacking in depth, apart from that, I don’t think I can really say anything negative about this film, every detail, every facet, every line of dialogue, everything is performed optimally, the artistry that went into the creation of the film is unparalleled.

When I first heard about Liz and the Blue Bird, I was quite conflicted. Hibike! Euphonium's second season was one of the biggest disappointments I've ever watched because of how much I didn't enjoy Mizore's arc. It got to the point where I dropped the show and never came back to it even after the arc was over. Creating a movie that expanded on something that drew me away from the franchise did not excite me one bit.

I decided to give it a shot anyway, seeing that I can't judge the side story based on the parent story, and boy was I surprised.

I'm not sure ... what the motivation behind this project was - whether it was envisioned to be a fix to the original Mizore arc or a passion project. I'm not even sure whether or not this is part of the original source material. But I know for sure that Naoko Yamada did a brilliant job taking over this film.

Liz and the Blue Bird was everything that Hibike! Euphonium's second season should've been. Instead of giving us the snoozefest forced drama seen through Kumiko's perspective, we got to see how Mizore and Nozomi's relationship actually worked in THEIR perspective. Can you believe how much could change if you simply changed the main characters themselves and not have it be played out from a third-party perspective just because they're the main character? Yes you can because that actually makes so much more sense.

But don't misunderstand me. Changing the perspective doesn't automatically make the film good. What sold me on the film was how brilliantly it managed to portray their relationship. Very little dialogue was used in the film. What Yamada did, was simply put together a bunch of scenes in Mizore's perspective, and transition those groups of scenes between an animation of the "Liz and the Blue Bird" picture book. Simply animating the picture book itself and comparing it with the following scenes was enough for the viewer to make connections between the two. Simply showing a normal interaction between Mizore, Nozomi, and the rest of their classmates was enough for the viewer to understand the relationship between the two. Absolutely no explanation was needed - the viewer just needed to pay attention to what was going on.

I'm not really a fan of shy and quiet characters because it's hard for them to stand out and express themselves. However, Naoko Yamada really has a gift for bringing these types of characters to life. It was easy to emphasize with Mizore's behavior, especially in contrast to extroverted characters around her. She reminded me of Shouko from Koe no Katachi, which Yamada also directed. Shouko had trouble expressing her feelings because she was deaf. Even though she couldn't hear or speak properly, the viewers can still understand how she feels because of how well the scenes portrayed her body language and feelings. The same goes for Mizore. There were so many scenarios in which she wanted to express her feelings but Nozomi was too dense to realize it. We know exactly how she feels based on her actions and how she copes with rejection. Shy and quiet characters are difficult to understand because they don't often use words. But they have the greatest and deepest potential to understand because we focus on everything else they do instead.

I'm glad Hibike! Euphonium still gets a lot of attention from KyoAni because it was a very unique project that they took. Seeing Liz and the Blue Bird made me realize how beautiful you can make films without having to resort to any clickbait or flashy material that many Hollywood and mainstream anime use. It's not the premise that makes it good, but the direction and emotion that the creators put into it. And with that, I'm definitely looking forward to the next Hibike! Euphonium movie that will be released next year.

As of writing this, I've rewatched this movie around 5 times. But rewatching anime films is nothing out of the ordinary. Nor is picking up on new details and artistic touches each time; I've spent a similar amount of time picking apart the meaning behind Naoko Yamada's other masterpieces, Koe no Katachi and K-On. Unlike those two, however, Liz and the Blue Bird manages to stay fresh every time.

Firstly, to get this out of the way: Liz is, in my opinion, a functionally standalone film. Some knowledge on how Nozomi and Mizore's conflict played out in Hibike! Euphonium Season 2 may help, but it's not ... necessary.

Considering the almost laughably minute scope of Liz's plot - one setting, one ephemeral friendship, one tiny time frame - the idea of it being able to produce continuous novelty and excitement seems far-fetched. Liz's workaround, cliched as it may sound, is to dive into the micro, rather than the macro.

Nowhere is this more prominent than in Liz's opening sequence. Koe no Katachi starts with bombastic youthful exuberance, a slideshow of Shoya and his friends living the time of their life backed up by a charming 1960s hit. K-On's movie chooses a similarly intriguing way to begin, subverting our expectations of the band before revealing it all to be part of a prank. But Liz hits a far different chord, with only one short exchange occurring in 6 minutes of otherwise narrative silence, supported by Kensuke Ushio's "wind,glass,bluebird". For a movie about music, these wordless 6 minutes were as much an introduction to the main cast as a display of cinematographic and directorial flair. Nozomi drops her indoor shoes carelessly onto the ground, while Mizore elects to softly lay them down. Nozomi spins on the spot before entering the music room, but Mizore stands still, watching her friend walk further and further away into a gradually whitening screen. And that's JUST the first SIX minutes.

At this point, Liz has already shown its hand. There are no major plot twists, no world-shaking drama, no big objective the characters must struggle to, but inevitably achieve. Life is rarely so outspoken and clear-cut, after all.

Rather, Liz stakes its hopes on touching its audience with a humble, realistic depiction of youth. No one has the answers to everything, not unless you're an edgy 14-year old with the ability to hack a VR game from within. No one is ever confined to a stereotype, and no one ever really knows the true consequences of what they are doing. By placing such great emphasis on each action and reaction, we are able to grasp how the actions that one party regards as typical can be perceived by the other as monumental. Characters lie to the camera just as much as they lie to each other, appearing to respond in one way, but showing minute cracks in their facade which point towards another. Truly, nothing can really be condensed down to concepts as simplistic as "tsundere", or "happily ever after". We must learn to respect the different perspectives and emotions that everyone around us faces, lest we hurt our friends in ways we may not even be aware of.

That attention to detail isn't just limited to our main duo either; Yuuko, Natsuki, and Ririka could've been lazily written solely to advance the plot, but through the difference between their interactions with Nozomi and Mizore, we see how differently the two are perceived by their closest friends, and the delicate ground everyone must tread.

It goes without saying too that Liz would not be nearly as outstanding without its music. The composition of the titular piece, "Liz and the Blue Bird", is beautifully sad in its own right, but by scattering snippets of it throughout the film, its emotional payoff is that much more significant. Kensuke Ushio does just as good of a job in Liz as in Koe no Katachi, with individual tracks like "reflexion,allegretto,you" heightening the emotions evoked by their accompanying scenes, while changes in musical tone indicate shifts in emotional states and perspectives. For lovers of Liz's parent series, Hibike! Euphonium, this attention to musical detail would come as no surprise.

Liz respects its characters. Liz respects the modest scope it starts with. Liz respects the uncertainty that clouds everyday existence and interaction. It would've been so easy to invoke "the power of friendship", creating rifts in Nozomi's and Mizore's relationship while introducing a larger challenge they had to overcome together so they would necessarily advance towards a happy ending. If one looks at the general plot outline of Liz, that may very well be the conclusion drawn. What does a "happy" ending mean, though? There's no clear goal achieved at the end of the show. No one's life has been significantly altered, and Nozomi's and Mizore's relationship barely changes from the movie's beginning.

What's been achieved, however, is infinitely more important than some tangible victory. It is mutual understanding and acceptance, and in our day and age, it's something we all need.

Liz is my favourite piece of media from any medium.

This is an extremely rambly, personal review and contains spoilers throughout.

I made a video version of it which I'm really proud of. Here's a link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRR4oOKB4uk

It consists 100% of that gooey intimate shit I found so potent in the TV series with even more perceptiveness and sensation. This movie is layer upon layer of subtle gestures and mannerisms that inform the overt yet undying sense of connection between two people. Hugs, glances and touches become the most important things in the universe. I don’t think Liz has the grandest story ever. It doesn’t ... revolutionise anime or film in a major way. It’s not even that “deep.” The End of Evangelion (1997) is chock full of guerilla filmmaking techniques, mindsearing imagery, masterful tonal variance and difficult yet heartfelt messages that tap into the most universal struggles faced by humanity: it’s hard for Liz to hold a candle to that. Likewise, once you get into live action cinema beyond your filmbro movies you start getting exposed to crazy shit that dramatically raises your standards. Dog Star Man (1961-1964) by Stan Brakhage is a silent epileptic seizure that cuts between random things for an hour and thirty mins. My last essay was on Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang, whose mission statement is to depict sex addicts fucking inanimate objects. I’m getting more and more desensitized to simply “good” media. You have to be niche, you have to be brave, a creator needs to tap into my fetishes and my personal life to grab my attention. Polish is important, but perfection doesn’t interest me. Roman Muradov, a comic artist I admire, sums up the appeal of stories beyond just how “good” they are (replace his use of the word “comics” with “story”): “It's not about the quality of the writing, or the art, and not even about the originality of the characters and the plot—it's about that cohesion that the best comics have and the not-best comics lack, regardless of the excellence of their individual qualities.” A show like Sound! Euphonium has got the writing and directing chops but it would be nothing without its flourishes of human emotion and connection. Liz provides me with that cohesion, that clarity, that appeal to fetish. It feels like a warm hug that I’ve been starving for, both within my media desensitisation and my barren loser-lead real life. It’s experimental yet always precise with its intent while also managing to just be really fucking cute. Liz makes me feel like Björk on the song Headphones: “They start off cells that haven't been touched before/These cells are virgins.” I’ve watched it twice now and both times were spent predominantly with tears in my eyes. It’s been scraping my mind’s insides with feelings of both warm tenderness and searing grief ever since I watched it. I had a hard cope and bought a US import of the bluray alongside a region free bluray player just so I can marvel at it on my TV. I’ve skipped class to write this essay. I’ve logged into google drive on my workplace’s computer to write this essay. It’s helped me process something embarrassingly and hilariously awful that I’ve done recently, which I’ll cue you in on at the end of the review.

Part of the movie’s intrigue is where it places its priorities. There’s a seemingly inherent lack of stakes, with the band’s main goal of reaching the national competition only serving to guide the discourse of Mizore and Nozomi’s smaller narrative. I think the fact that we have to return to the pain of these characters even after it seems like the TV show wrapped up their problems with a bow speaks to the gruelling time and effort that real-life change actually requires. It’s crueller than failing an audition or losing a competition. Yamada never takes the spotlight off of who or what’s actually relevant to the story. She doesn’t exploit the audience’s familiarity with Euphonium’s characters with intrusive cameos. Kumiko, our previous main character of the franchise, has speaking lines in two scenes and she’s not even the main focus in either of them. Reina, the secondary mc, has more screen time, only to be a cunty bully to Mizore. Anyway, the consideration Yamada has put into exploring Mizore and Nozomi’s microcosm within a larger, more enthralling story is an admirable act of empathy. KyoAni’s all about this shit, creating the most lifelike, unpretentious, subversive, progressive and love-infused anime in the entire industry. Yamada never trivialises the emotions of her characters. She stops to smell the roses, appreciating beauty where most people aren’t looking. “The unique worries that people face during adolescence, about how they want to end up, what they want to be, those kinds of wishes people have, these feelings are something that I think are very beautiful.” There’s bravery in asserting that these things matter, what most would call pedantic hormonal teenage bullshit. What is life but our mundane struggles, our intangible inadequacies and the chaos of our emotions? It’s as I’ve said in my Lily Chou-Chou (2001) and Bokurano reviews. Our adult lives are informed so much about when we’re young. I find there’s so many things which initially didn’t seem to matter much to me being the ultimate deciders of who I’ve become. I’ve shared single hugs with certain people which have both affirmed me or scarred me to this very day. People who I’ve had only a few conversations with have changed my life. I’m as much of a sensitive, brittle snowflake as Mizore is. It sucks. It’s turned me into a loser. Milling about everything is often painful and unproductive. But I seek to be truthful, to be honest and perceptive in the same way KyoAni is with their work. What a cunt I am.
Yamada immediately asserts her ambition with Liz by scrapping the original show’s design completely. She drains away the saturation, the flushed faces and the autumny hues for something stark and anemic. We’re being drawn into Mizore's dazed and isolated headspace and we need a new look to reflect that. The tonal work and lighting is more solitary and flat to accommodate the minimalistic look. The girls are wearing their summer uniforms, but the pastelly washed out blue hues make the climate seem perpetually cold and dewey. Yamada said she wanted the movie to look like it was being displayed inside the world of a tinted glass bottle. She achieves this hollow effect through the use of digital processing to create an illusion of an actual camera filming the animated scenes. It gives a stronger impression of a 3-dimensional space in which the director can emphasise certain focal points in the foreground and background. Yamada uses this technique to plop you right in the scene, to feel the characters’ quaking motion and discomfort.

Futoshi Nishiya was brought on board to revamp the character designs, mirroring the style he utilised in A Silent Voice to make the characters more proportionally-balanced and scant in detail. It’s entertaining to see the characters we are familiar with translated into a completely new context. Despite KyoAni applying their usual soft and realistic touch to the characters in Sound! Euphonium, they’re still essentially stubby anime babies with voluminous hair, huge glistening insect eyes and rosy red cheeks that look like swollen pimples. Yamada and Nishiya change them all from the ground up. Kumiko’s angular, gravity-defying octopus hair from the TV series has been nerfed to a poofy little pompom! The thread-thin linework is impeccable, reflecting the fragility of the feelings of the characters. I love the elongated arms, legs and necks. They give the characters this added sense of maturity and femininity. I find the smaller eyes and less pronounced facial features of the characters much more cute and approachable. The vacantness that they conform to, the lack of silly anime expressions, creates a volcanic rise out of every minute gesture and detail. Every bat of an eyelid, turn of a heel, glisten of a retina, exhalation of breath. Yamada is praised by fans for her ability to communicate the internal emotions of her characters by limiting the audience’s view to single sets of body parts. For fuck’s sake, it’s embarassing that you can’t go a single Yamada-related video essay without the writer saying something about the director’s use of leg shots. She doesn’t need to rely on the face every time, any part of the body works as a canvas. You need this level of variance to convey the complexity of these characters and Yamada pulls it off. The author of Liz’s source material, Takeda Ayano, points out the delicateness that the movie evoke, saying that “[they’re like] a photograph of a soap bubble before it bursts.” Here, here.

Liz is about exploring Mizore’s utter obsession with Nozomi. Mizore displays such a longing to be loved, a longing to be present with someone, to feel humbled and abundant. Nozomi emanates a quilt-like warmth for Mizore, fending away the isolation, the bitterness. Every nice word Nozomi tosses at her, every moment they share, every shift of her body renders Mizore helpless. She attempts to lean on Nozomi’s shoulder in the clubroom, reaching for a sense of peace, just a second to breathe. When Nozomi gets close, a galaxy is born. Her pupils dilate with joy or shrink with anxious excitement. When the two of them walk up to the music room, Mizore laps-up Nozomi’s every footstep, every movement, like a drooling dog. Nozomi’s ponytail bounces back and forth like a pendulum, entrancing Mizore to move forward. When your life is as empty as hers, every little thing ripples inside of you, resounding over and over into inordinance. She’s as fixated as a Tsai Ming Liang character. Mizore is so desperate. There’s a scene of Mizore receiving the light bouncing off of Nozomi’s flute from opposing windows of the school. Mizore reacts as if this faintest form of connection is a lifeboat that will save her from her loneliness. When Nozomi leaves a second later, Mizore’s direness is palpable. It’d be an understatement to say that, without Nozomi, Mizore would be a little bit lost.

Regardless of Mizore’s passion, this movie is ultimately about Mizore and Nozomi’s strained seams. Kumiko and Reina’s story in the Euphonium TV series was about finding affirmation in one another’s gradual closeness, but Mizore and Nozomi’s story in Liz is about examining disjointedness. The emotional distance, the lack of coherence between Mizore and Nozomi, is expressed through visual gesture, acute pacing and framing. Mizore is always shot trailing behind Nozomi’s bold entrance or opposite of where she stands, watching in awe from afar like a spectator, like a child at the zoo. She’s the first to arrive on the dawn of a school day, waiting in fervor for the precise second Nozomi walks into the gates. When the two girls do share the frame, it’s only to highlight how quickly Nozomi exits it, or to emphasise the void of empty space between where they stand. Yamada’s use of quick cuts is especially effective at displaying Nozomi’s dismissiveness, the relentlessness of her pace compared to Mizore’s lovey-dovey paralysis. Nozomi offers and retracts a hug for Mizore before she can even respond in any sort of manner, leaving Mizore’s face flabbergasted and her pussy dripping wet just from the sight of Nozomi’s open arms. It’s a constant tortoise-hare affair. The conversations the two share always seem one-sided in Nozomi’s favour. Nozomi, purposefully or not, mistakes Mizore’s intentions and frames her words in a different manner.

“I’m happy,” Mizore says, plainly and purely. She’s happy to play early in the morning in the clubroom with Nozomi, to be sitting side by side with her best friend.
“Oh, you’re happy about it too, Mizore? Same here. This piece is great! I’m really happy we picked it for our free choice piece.”

What a fuckwit.
Distance and proximity between Mizore and Nozomi is captured in an eerily accurate way through the film’s soundtrack and sound design. Yamada got this avant fuck named Kensuke Ushio to compose Liz’s music, portraying Mizore and Nozomi’s disjointedness as well as their sense of place to a tee. Yamada and Ushio went directly to the school the movie’s setting is based off of to record themselves playing with the equipment they found there. They dragged tables and chairs on the floor, clinked test tubes and beakers together, tapped their fingers on the windows, activated water fountains and walked down the school’s hallways. Then they took these field recordings and mingled them with disparate prepared piano passages and other instruments from the band’s ensemble. Prepared piano involves cramming shit between the strings of the piano to create more homely, almost percussive timbres when you hit the keys. It’s what Aphex Twin did on the piano tracks he recorded for his album Drukqs. It’s why Avril 14th sounds as divine as it does, and the same technique is used in Liz’s soundtrack to create the feeling of inhabiting the school. Ushio and Yamada wanted to position themselves as the inanimate objects they recorded, pretending that they were intimately observing Mizore and Nozomi from a shelf or a tabletop. In terms of composition, they employed a technique called "decalcomania", which involves spilling ink on sheet music, folding it in rorschach fashion, and then playing the notes in accordance to wherever the ink blots land. The decalcomania technique was meant to communicate how Mizore and Nozomi are often disparate from one another but still fundamentally connected, stemming from the same ink blot if you will. All this shit is mad, but the production fact that impressed me the most was that certain scenes had their diegetic sound PERFECTLY SYNCED to their corresponding musical pieces. Actually, Mizore and Nozomi’s footsteps in the opening scene of the film aren’t diegetic at all: they’re non-diegetic footstep samples incorporated into Ushio’s composition. They even have their own unique time signature, despite each girl’s footsteps being completely out of sync. The animators had to time their frames in correlation to these samples with painstaking accuracy. It blows my mind the level of effort and wankery Yamada and her team put into this. The animation, the sound design, the music: they’re are all in perfect sync to convey a rich sense of space as well as the magic of Mizore and Nozomi’s relationship.

Like in Sound! Euphonium, when words are futile devices for the complexity of one’s feelings, the characters can find liberation through symbolic and non-verbal meaning. The title of the movie, Liz and the Blue Bird, stems from a fictional storybook that the girls read throughout the film. The plot and characters from the storybook act as the basis of the musical piece that Mizore and Nozomi’s band will perform at the national competition. The film breaks away into fantasy sequences to share the book’s story, changing the film’s visual style tremendously. Yamada undoes all the sombre hues and dead space established in Mizore’s reality, replacing it with vibrant, watercolour bliss. I think the trope of escaping reality into wondrous pornographic fantasy is one of my favourites, as I myself gouge on piles of frilly media to process my own problems. I talked in my Tsai essay about how his use of musical sequences communicated the characters’ internal conflicts in a bombastic and resolute manner, almost betraying the pain of their situation. The storybook portions of Liz function similarly, with Liz and the bird verbalising Mizore and Nozomi’s motivations in a very direct way. Liz is a lonely girl who’s ecstatic when she’s finally approached by one true friend. But this friend isn’t human, she’s a bird that belongs in the open sky. The story is about imprisoning the one you hold most dear. Your love for them ignores their needs and their right to be free. Liz realises she has to let the bird go one day in order to respect her happiness, even if it means losing her one true source of connection. Mizore’s oboe solo for the performance has to communicate Liz letting go of the bird, but Mizore doesn’t understand Liz’s feelings. She doesn’t want to let go of Nozomi, who plays the role of the bird through her flute. She’s too selfish.

Mizore must acknowledge that Nozomi is her own person with her own problems. Nozomi feels insecurity around Mizore because she can’t measure up to her as a musician. When Mizore doesn’t perform the solo correctly during recital, Nozomi starts to believe that she’s holding Mizore back, that she’s forcing Mizore to play down at her level. She’s bitter when one of the music teachers offers Mizore an application to a prestigious music school. She wants to apply there too in order to compete with her, not necessarily because she actually wants to be a poorass starving musician for a living. Nozomi’s cheerful facade and her tactical ignoring are defense mechanisms against Mizore’s advances to get closer. She’s a manic pixie dream girl lmao. Her happy tone and veneer of genki good times cause her to be dishonest in the way she approaches Mizore. Her arms are always laced behind her back, there’s always something up her sleeves. She presses her shoulders back and stands upright amidst her bitter contemplations. Yamada’s positioning of the “camera” makes it hard to read Nozomi, often obscuring her face as she talks to Mizore. Her character design features a long strand of hair that hovers perpetually above one of her eyes, symbolising her withdrawn two-facedness. There’s a great video essay I watched about Nozomi’s character which compares her demeanour to that of a blowfish. Blowfish are described as “cute” by characters throughout the movie. Mizore even feeds a tank of them during her retreats in the biology room. They possess a strange gravity that draws people in, but they puff up when something threatens them. They’re cultural delicacies, but have a toxin stored within their bodies that will fucking kill you. Likewise, Nozomi is strong, aloof, sweet and at the centre of Mizore’s universe, but there’s no denying that she’s also malicious. As much as I’ve painted Nozomi as a dismissive person, you can’t blame her too much. She’s trying her best to conquer her fear and jealousy. She’s only human.

It’s not like Mizore is exactly being an approachable friend either. We see her avoid the communal chattering between Nozomi and the other girls in the classroom, choosing to sit by herself in the biology room every day at lunch time. She doesn’t know how to communicate her feelings, her desire to be closer to Nozomi. She tugs at her hair like a security blanket as she wades in her rumination, her trepidation. Will I burden Nozomi? Does Nozomi care about me at all? Atsumi Tanezaki, Mizore’s voice actress, had this to say about her portrayal of the character: “the director told me that Mizore feels like it's the last chance to be with Nozomi every time she meets her.” Her eyes droop to the floor as she calculates what she should say. The majority of her replies are concise and permissive stutters. Mizore's hunched, forward-leaning posture is strategic, allowing her to lean just an increment closer into Nozomi’s business. She bears all of it, the desperation, the confusion, the strife under her cold, asocial shell. But this inability to speak up, this internal meandering, is exactly what’s holding her back. She’s a voyeur of Nozomi. She’s a simp, not an equal or a friend. Mizore’s precariousness makes her attempts to connect just as insincere and insufficient as Nozomi’s. She’s an incredible oboist, but she could care less about competitions or fancy universities. Her only reason for playing is to be by Nozomi’s side, she dreads the final day of their third year in high school. She only wants to apply to the music school if Nozomi is applying too. All of Mizore’s past hurt, present enjoyment and future prospects stem from her codependence on Nozomi. It’s not healthy. Mizore and Nozomi’s relationship is important and undeniably special, but something needs to change if they want things to work.

The school setting is a figurative cage which mirrors Mizore and Nozomi’s immobilisation and the roles they play as Liz and the blue bird. Something that initially confused me about this movie is how we don’t get to visit Mizore’s home at all. It’s a staple in KyoAni shows to visit the bedrooms of the main characters as a moment of characterisation. I wanted to see Mizore’s stuffed animals, or know whether or not her room was a desolate shitstained pigsty like fellow asocial anime associate Rei Ayanami. The little props, toys and posters within the characters’ rooms help extend what we know about them as people, but we don’t see that here. On top of that, we don’t get to see any of the characters go anywhere outside the school at all. There’s mentions of Mizore and Nozomi going to festivals and pool parties, but the film purposefully never shows them. The movie only chooses to stitch together the moments when both of them are at school. This is one of the main criticisms I had with the movie at first, because I felt that home and outdoor scenes would be ample opportunities to give the character interactions more breathing room. But that’s exactly the thing, Yamada doesn’t want to give us that, she wants us to feel claustrophobic. Mizore is trapped. Nozomi is trapped. They enter the school at the start of the movie and are stuck there for its entirety. There’s really nothing in Mizore’s universe that exists outside of Nozomi. It makes the opportunities for Mizore and Nozomi to explore each others’ company feel more restricted and hollow, while also making the mundane nudges and encounters they have more desperate and explosive in sensation. This in tandem with Yamada’s frigid aesthetic and shot composition only emphasise the cage motif further. We see birds flying in the sky from outside the school’s windows, not bound by ceilings or walls. Mizore needs to let Nozomi free.
Ririka, a ditzy underclassman and fellow oboist, shows Mizore’s potential to develop a more healthy relationship with Nozomi. I feared that Ririka’s character would fall under the mean-spirited gossipy girl archetype, whose doting of Mizore would only emphasise Mizore’s feebleness and social incompetence. But to both mine and Mizore’s surprise, Ririka’s approaches are genuine, becoming a true friend of Mizore throughout the film. Sure, Ririka and her cronies coin Mizore with the nickname “Ice Queen,” but her approaches are patient and free of disdain. Mizore is actually positioned as the asshole here, quickly shooting down Ririka’s invites to outings and parties. When Ririka breaks down in tears in front of Mizore, telling her that she failed the band’s audition to play in the competition, to play alongside the senior she cares so much about, Mizore has to make an active decision to reach her half way. I love this scene. Ririka’s characterisation as the playful and carefree counterpart to Mizore crumbles in an instant. Her voice actress does this pitchy, dry-throated wail that just overflows in a state of confusion and agony.

Ririka proves that Mizore is capable of opening herself up to others, that she can overcome her shyness and her preoccupations with a bit of a nudge. She starts making oboe reeds for Ririka and lets her play by her side. But this only draws attention to how her relationship with Nozomi does not function under the same level of transparency, drawing their distance further apart. When Mizore asks Nozomi if she can invite Ririka to the seniors’ pool gath, we see Nozomi’s face drop with visible shock, before the frame is wiped by a passing-by classmate. As the classmate exits the frame a second later, Nozomi has already plastered a fake smile onto her face: “What do we have here? You normally never say something like that!” Similarly in a later scene, Nozomi notices the sound of Mizore and Ririka playing oboe together from the floor above, tilting her head up with a look of trepidation before laughing it off and returning to her friends. This is peak lesbian jealousy.

With time and reflection, Mizore accepts that she must free Nozomi from her cage. This occurs not during some sort of grand display at the national competition, but during rehearsal in the band’s clubroom. As with everything in this movie, this moment is small, it’s off the beaten path, but it’s intimate and delicate and sensual. All of the film’s threads of communication, the storybook, the music, the wordless gestures, reach an intersection of clarity through Mizore’s oboe solo. The storybook sequences conclude prior to the soloing scene and never show up again, as if to suggest that Mizore and Liz’s surrender is occurring concurrently. Fiction bleeds right into reality. We get cuts to a bird flapping away, rendered using the same decalcomania technique as the sheet music compositions. The painted wings are identically mirrored across a folded point of the animation cell to create the image of a bird. Genius, genius shit. In terms of musical and auditory communication, this is another example of a scene where the piece was recorded before animating the actions afterwards. Yamada coordinated with a live oboist and flutist to play Mizore and Nozomi’s performances before precisely animating on top. “The [oboist and flutist] listened to me so attentively... They really managed to get on board emotionally and did a great deal of acting.” You can hear intermittent breaths between the two musicians and the acoustic hums of their instruments. Mizore soars with a confidence unseen throughout the entire movie, spilling her guts out in the piece all while retaining a straight face. I can barely comment on the piece itself. Nozomi’s reaction says it all. Her flute cuts out abruptly mid-phrase. “There's a moment where Nozomi doesn't want to lose but just can't fight back. [The live musicians] had really broken down and understood this moment, so the expression in the music was so good.”

Trickles of tears drop down from above the frame onto Nozomi’s lap. Mizore has breached right through Nozomi’s ironclad facade. She communicates her convictions bare, transcending the need for words. The camera flies through the window out of the clubroom, following the decalcomania-rendered bird as it departs the school grounds. The music stops. Everybody’s jaws drop open, one girl even starts crying. My tears already started flowing when Nozomi’s did. Practice ends and the rest of the band members pigpile Mizore with compliments. But the person Mizore wants to see the most has already bolted off.

Mizore tracks Nozomi down, finding her in the familiar biology classroom. Nozomi’s eyes are flaking red from crying, but Nozomi still acts as her old self, smugly denying such an outburst. Nozomi then starts cutting into Mizore, outwardly expressing her jealousy and inadequacy with a playful smile. It becomes clear here that Nozomi projected herself in the storybook too, but she perceived HERSELF as Liz and Mizore as the blue bird. Mizore and Nozomi were simultaneously playing the roles of both the prisoner and the captor. What makes this especially fucky is that during the storybook sequences, both Liz and the blue bird are played by the same voice actress, Miyu Honda. This in tandem with the decalcomania bird also being rendered of mirrored inkblots reinforces the fact Mizore and Nozomi are one in the same, yet so completely different and disjointed.

“You were holding back all this time right?” says Nozomi. “I’m not amazing like you... I’m just an ordinary girl.” But Mizore doesn’t need Nozomi to prove herself to her. She unconditionally believes Nozomi is amazing. Music means nothing to Mizore in the face of how much she cares about Nozomi. All she asks of Nozomi is to be present with her, to listen to her. She shuts down Nozomi’s defensive self-defeating interjections. “Will you listen to me? You’re always so inconsiderate.” Mizore twists the dagger into Nozomi, finally letting herself affirm her feelings. No more squandering, no more hoarding.
Mizore goes in for the hug she’s been wanting all this time. She falls into Nozomi, giving her all of herself. It’s the saddest, most pathetic hug I’ve ever seen. Nozomi darts her heels back, Mizore softly fumbles with how and where to press her hands, Nozomi returns the hug with limp obligation. But this is monumental for Mizore, relaying herself even more clearly and truthfully than during her oboe solo. The two are finally united. This is relief in all its splendour, fighting back in the face of uncertainy. 99999999 staples are pressed into my heart. No melodrama, no contrivance. Pure, unbridled love.
“When you talked to me, became my friend, you were so nice to me, it made me really happy.”
Nozomi shrugs this off. “Sorry, I don’t remember that too well.”
“I think it’s amazing how you can lead everyone and enjoy yourself all the time.”
“You’re an amazingly hard worker-”
“I love the way you laugh. I love the way you talk. I love your footsteps. I love your hair. I love everything about-”
“I love your oboe.”

Even at their closest, their hearts still aren’t in the same place. It’s clear that they love and admire each other, but for completely different reasons. Mizore is loved for her talent and work ethic. Nozomi is loved just for who she is. But what matters here is their transparency with one another. Nozomi breaks the tension with unfeigned laughter, able to process and accept everything Mizore’s feelings. She hugs Mizore tighter. These girls have learnt how to be authentic with their feelings. Nozomi can stop measuring herself against Mizore and carve her own future. Mizore can learn to be self-assured and to respect Nozomi’s boundaries. Their love is genuine and it deserves to be salvaged. By living their lives as their best selves, they can truly learn to be present for one another.

I lost a friend recently. I think I was in love with them but I'm not exactly sure. I exhibited a lot of Mizore and Nozomi’s worst traits in terms of how I interacted with them. I was obsessive, gloomy and needy a lot of the time like Mizore, on top of being dismissive, deceitful and jealous like Nozomi. But I really did like this person. This movie reminded me of the ways this person possessed a wonderful ephemerality just from the smallest, dorkiest things they did. I wanted to free them from my possessive projectiony horniness. But I wasn’t strong or humble enough like Mizore or Nozomi to reach an understanding and I ended things in the worst way possible. We met up in a bar at like 3am after they had already left me earlier in the night. We started the night together, but I was being dismissive and drunk so they went off with some other guy. As I strutted around town in impotent jealousy, I made acquaintances with a random guy of my own and he followed me into the bar. To my (daft) surprise, he started making moves on me. I told him about the situation with my friend and how I was unable to be very emotionally-present for him, but he was very understanding. He made out with me and fondled my little cock in the bar while the person I was in love with was downstairs. I'm a virgin so this stuff doesn't happen to me often. I hadn’t gone this far before. It was consensual and I feel okay about it, but I don't even think I'm gay or bi. Regardless, I’m pretty dissociative and impulsive so I’ll take what I can lmao. For me it was a very ungendered, asexual experience, I didn’t really feel any joy. I couldn't reciprocate anything for the person. I was as mobile and affectionate as a corpse! But they helped me feel like I was a person again for a few seconds. They were very kind to me. Their soap smelled alright.

I found my friend afterwards, still with the guy they went off with at the start of the night. I asked the guy if I could talk to my friend for five minutes. Despite the prick I was being, he politely let us be. I told my friend that I was too greedy to respect their boundaries and that I didn't know how to sustain our friendship anymore. Inspired by Mizore, I selfishly gushed about all the things I loved about them like a creepy fuck. I told them that this was the end. I didn’t tell them about the dude I just made out with though. I wanted to cry, I really felt I needed to, but there was nothing. I was only thinking about my own skin the entire time. I booked an uber and left, arriving back home at 5am. The ride cost me $40.

I’m not sharing this story to show off, even though I do think the story is utterly hilarious. If you’re laughing at or with me, I’m all for it! I deserve it! But I do want to vent, I haven’t really processed things yet. The main purpose of my oversharing is to illustrate why this movie means so much to me and how I relate to it. I think there's a longevity and eternal truth in the depiction of the characters that's really beautiful. Their simplicity allows their struggles to feel broad and relatable across so many contexts. Outside of that one experience I shared, there are so many past and present relationships in my life which remind me of Mizore and Nozomi’s dysfunctional intimacy. But this movie presented me with a relationship where two people could find a way forward and could find a way to be together, even through all the toxicity and the sadness. It feels like a resistance story that gives my own stories a happy ending, or a means of which I can improve my own current situation. But while this film has given me so much hope and joy and things to think about, as much as this film has given me to heal, there’s something wholly unfixable and painful to acknowledge about the people who produced it.

Liz is a reminder of KyoAni’s eternal triumph through the arson attack they sustained in 2019. This incident led to the death of 36 people. As much of a relief
that Yamada herself wasn’t at the studio on the day of the arson, the loss of so many others working in close stride to her on this film and in so many other productions is incomprehensible. I wanted to address it in more detail here just out of basic respect and to remain critically aware and considerate of the people who make the work I care about. Nami Iwasaki was responsible for notable key animation in this film, rendering Mizore and Nozomi’s hug scene in all its startling brilliance. She also animated the richest portions of Reina and Kumiko’s mountain scene I discussed in the Euphonium review. Futoshi Nishiya, the character designer and animation director I’ve mentioned throughout the essay, died in the arson. He understood so clearly the direction the characters needed to be taken to explore who they were as people. I have provided a list of the other deceased KyoAni members who worked on Liz at the end of the essay. I am so grateful that they were each able to impart something so beautiful to the world and something that means so much to me. Their work was about learning to connect with others, letting go of your cynicism and engaging with the people and pursuits that provide you with true happiness. They helped me find meaning in life when it has felt so empty. There's so many people who I want to thank who I can't properly thank. Production is a huge collaborative effort where some people’s roles go unappreciated behind the scenes. But these people are just as important. There is beauty to be felt everywhere. People in planning who helped get everyone's work in tiptop shape. People in special effects who brought Liz's frigid dimensionality to life. My favourite shot in the film is an in-between frame of animation: a frame designed to paste the "key" notable frames together. The transience, the vulnerability of Mizore's face here, is something so life affirming. Yet, this entire scene's cut of animation remains uncredited, and the person who could have drawn this among KyoAni's pool of in-between animators could be dead. Everyone's presence was necessary for this to work.

There is so much carnage and tragedy in the world to be able to mourn it all, to remember that there are faces behind all of those numbers. To find any semblance of sanity, all we can do is care for the few people we do have, hold them tight and dear, and hope they'll be okay. But what can we do when coincidence is cruel? What do we do when the worst happens to the people we love? KyoAni may have found an answer. Tatsuya Ishihara and Yamada Naoko have gone on to make some of the best work they have ever produced. Tatsuya Ishihara was required to continue production on Dragonmaid Season 2, the first season of which was directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto who died in the arson. Ishihara and his crew did Takemoto’s legacy proud, injecting as much life and thoughtfulness that was present in the first season. Yamada departed from KyoAni to produce Heike Monogatari at Science Saru. It encapsulates all of her pain but also her perseverance. It is a show about losing everything you have loved, but learning to stomach everything, and living with that pain with open arms, without forgetting it. While part of living with this is to commemorate the wondrous things the departed have accomplished, and to celebrate the bravery of the people who survived, part of it is to completely acknowledge how awful all of this is, how much it didn't need to happen, and to find a healthy means to express the confusion, sadness and hatred in our hearts. For as much money is donated to help the cause, for as much new talent is hired, for as much empathy people from all the world express for the situation, the people who died aren't coming back. What makes this situation even sadder is that several of the victims of the fire were animation students being trained at the studio: they were about to start their careers, were about to do wonderful things, but their mission statements were stillborn. But these people were people foremost. Human life of any sort is valuable, and their work or status in the industry should not be the sole basis on which we care about them or identify who they are. The arson will continue to affect the people intimately related to the staff and industry at large. I acknowledge that some of my attempts to pay respects to the studio may be futile in outcome, or possibly disrespectful or patronising to the parties affected. in many regards, this review has been pretty juvenile and silly in tone. I hope my genuine love and respect for the people of Kyoto Animation has been made apparent through everything I've had to say. But I'm sorry if I've treated the subject matter inappropriately or haphazardly. I'm sorry if I'm overreaching, talking on the behalf of people who I've never even met, talking on the behalf of the suffering, talking on the behalf of the dead. All I can hope for the loved ones of those who were lost is to continue to live their lives in a manner that is personally fulfilling and comfortable for them. To find a way to recover in spite of the irreplaceable presence of these people being ripped away from them.

The film concludes with Mizore and Nozomi finally being able to leave the school grounds, their prison. They’re ready to hang out for some “Happy Ice-Cream.” Nozomi puts in the consideration to halt her strut and wait whereas Mizore waddles restlessly with enthusiasm to catch up. Through the subtlest adjustments of their movements we are able to tell that they’ve adapted to each other’s pace. I really needed this happy ending. Liz and the Blue Bird is about learning to develop unity. It is about the undying connections we can share with others, no matter the preconceived distance. It’s proven through Mizore and Nozomi’s unorthodox dynamic, rendered in the most precise and humanisti4c of animated movements. Their adorable interactions are what I cherish and relate to the most within this film, emulating the moments of transcendental joy that I’ve shared with my own friends and family. Yamada’s intuitive direction accentuates the tangibility of communication through the interplay of sound and scene, the distant yet shared origin of decalcomania blots and the tale of Liz letting her bird fly freely. Maintaining unity isn’t easy. It requires transparency and patience and self-determination. There is a quiet, writhing agony when the love between our girls breaks down. Mizore and Nozomi have to learn to live independently from now on, but it makes their bond all the more strong, more genuine, more loving than ever before. They’re not kissing. They’re not fucking. They’re just having fun. They’re two inkblots intermingling with one another. They’re two birds flying side by side. They’re free from their self-imposed cages. They’re joint.

An acknowledgement for the deceased who worked on this film. Thank you so much:

Ami Kuriki (Key Animation)
Atsushi Ishida (In-Between Animation)
Atsushi Miyaji (In-Between Animation)
Aya Sato (In-Between Animation)
Futoshi Nishiya (Character Design, Chief Animation Director)
Hiroyuki Takahashi (Mechanical Design, specifically of the instruments in this film)
Jun’ichi Uda (In-Between Animation)
Keisuke Yokota (Chief Manager)
Kota Sato (Key Animation)
Mikiko Watanabe (Background Art)
Nami Iwasaki (Key Animation)
Naomi Ishida (Colour Design, Colour Check)
Norie Oto (Special Effects)
Sachie Tsuda (Finish Animation)
Sana Suzuki (Key Animation)
Sayaka Watanabe (Key Animation)
Seiya Kawaguchi (In-Between Animation)
Shiho Morisaki (Key Animation)
Sumire Kusano (In-Between Animation)
Takahisa Fujita (Production Manager)
Tatsunari Maruko (Animation Director)
Yasuhiro Takemoto (Unit Director)
Yoshiji Kigami (Key Animation)
Yuko Myouken (Animation Director, Key Animation)

And other KyoAni members who were lost but who worked on other projects or were about to begin their careers:

Kana Matsuura (Key Animator)
Maiko Nishikawa (Animation Trainee)
Megumi Ono (Animation Trainee)
Miho Takechi (Key Animator)
Shoko Terawaki (Character Designer of Sound! Euphonium, Key Animator)
Sumire Kusano (In-Between Animator)
Tomoka Tokimori (Animation Trainee)
Yuka Kasama (Animation Trainee)
Yuki Omura (Animation Trainee)
Yumi Kaneo (Animation Trainee)

I could not find much information on these last two victims, which leads me to believe that they were members of the general public. Rest in peace:

Chitose Murayama
Kojiro Matsumoto