spoiler warning
I was afraid to return to this movie. Like with any KyoAni work, it’s hard to watch art from people who have been brutally hurt. But not only that: I read the manga, the source material for this recently and it kinda sucked. The best parts of it was the character art, how it realistically captured the clumsiness and chaos of life and how it portrayed bullying: how you can ruin a person’s life so easily and cruelly and for little reason. Everything else left a bad taste in my mouth. The story wasn’t about a person living with deafness: we got so little
...
from Shoko’s perspective. What could’ve been a story to empathise with someone with a marginalised perspective was sidelined by a lame, cliched redemption story. Interviews with the author showed how she was more interested in depicting bullying rather than exploring the life of a deaf person and it bloody shows in the work. There’s so many character arcs and overexplained speeches and “development” in a story that didn’t them. Things wrap up too cleanly for our characters and they act in a way that is too rigid for the realism of the setting and scenarios to breathe, to reach their full potential. I wanted real life and instead I got overwritten teen-novel bullshit. While the character art was great, everything else about the art sucked. Like a lot of commercial manga, the compositions were too stiff and lifeless and not confident enough to construct a formidable tone or visual language. At their worst, they captured the tone in a completely inappropriate way. I remember vividly when Shoko’s mother slaps Shoya, and the forms of the figures were too full of gesture and the composition was just too dramatic in a way that looked like a shonen action panel. That’s a tiny example but it mirrored across in many other scenes, like when Shoko is about to jump off the balcony so the author felt the need to draw a diagram in Shoya’s mind about how many floors below they would fall.
Yamada’s adaptation either fixes or improves or condenses or de-bullshits most of the qualms I had with the manga, with the worst parts being the manga’s fault. It’s a swift movie that chops off the fat in the manga or communicates things with much more subtlety, speed and finesse. The storyboarding and settings are beautifully rendered, each constructed with KyoAni’s care towards simple thematic imagery and symbolism. Leaps of faith, teenage rowdiness, Xing everyone out, a caged bridge that is returned to over and over again as a reminder of the fates of the characters, an enclosed pen that cages them away from the picturesque surrounding scenery. We get to see a beautiful range of emotion and gesture: while most Yamada/KyoAni shows are fixated on the quietness and affection and enthusiasm of the characters, and you still get plenty of that here, we get to see Yamada communicate frustration, panic and resentment. We also get more masculine characters which is great avenue unexplored by Yamada at this point. Shoya’s internal diatribe is much better shown than told, letting his hollowness and nervousness be portrayed through the character animation and framing. We get his deal instantly, his eyes shifting down, masking his face behind umbrellas, his nervous gagging. The weight of of his fears and guilt through the first quarter of the movie is clearly shown, so we need little elaboration about it after that and Reiko Yoshida gets that. He feels much less whiny and overly aware of the pain of his situation and much more aimless and sad and human as a result. It makes his redemption all the more believable and satisfying and actually worthwhile in this adaptation. The side characters are still the weakest part of this film, but Yamada and Yoshida improve things by making their presence feel more ambient. They all feel like a big entity of teenage conceit and toxicity, each a seperate fragment of said toxicity. We get each character’s flawed perspective without needing to tunnel into overexplained and meticulous backstories that the manga did, aiding the pace of the story. It helps communicate the speed and messiness of social teenage life much better and how Shoya gets to know enough about his friends’ attitudes without being able to understand or fix them in a thorough way that the typical “character arc” structure would force them to. Sure, that ending scene basically forces the audience to see how each character is improving, but only in their small , baby-step ways. Not a ribbon and a bow that the manga implied. Ushio’s music is fantastic as always, his minimalism really helps depict isolation, failed communication and the feeling of something being missing, whether that be sensory information, a friend’s presence, or a sense of peace. Futoshi Nishiya brings the characters to life with his designs, enhancing that already great character art further. It really upsets me remembering how integral he ways to Yamada’s crew.
In terms of Shoko, I’m not sure how much of her character was legit improved just through the story’s direction and execution or by actually showing a better understanding of deaf people. I still wish there were more scenes to explore the unique experiences that she would have. I think it’s still pretty egregious that she wasn’t even voiced by a deaf voice actress, I hate dubs but even the dubbies were considerate enough to get that right. But maybe wanting stuff like this, treating her portrayl as some sort of social justice checklist, is wrong too. Maybe I’m failing to empathise with deaf people by forcing them to be portrayed in a certain way, from my own uninformed viewpoint about what is and isn't right. I think this movie helped me understand Shoko’s character better and how her struggles as a person are unique because of who she is. Her self-hatred, her hyper-defensive family, her feelings of complicity, all stemming from the things she feels are her own fault. A wrongful self-accusation. Her sturdiness to criticism and cruelty and her insistence on making things right makes her someone who’s genuinely strong and admirable (her waiting for Ueno outside the hospital day after day made me emotional). I think generally there’s enough that is done to make Shoko feel like a genuine, self-driven person and not just a moe object of pity. The intricately animated sign language works much better in animation than still panels in a manga. The scenes of her trying her best to confess to Shoya, or enjoying her solitude feeding the fish or enjoying the fireworks that she feels she’s missing out on by instead feeling the ripples of the sound’s vibrations in her cup. These are all amazing pieces of characterisation. But I guess the source material still holds Shoko and the movie back: her dignity and strength as a character should have been shown through more of these smaller scenes, not a redemptive goosechase to make amends with the dumb teenage cunts while Shoya’s in the hospital. The worst scene in the movie is just the really weird scene where she cries on the bridge while Shoya rips off his lifetubes in the hospital to meet her, it’s dumb corny bullshit and it’s the manga’s fault it’s here.
This adaptation helps illuminate the best parts of the manga’s extremely flawed story, but to say it again, it occasionally brought down because of its connection to it. Still a very wonderful movie and a wonderful start to Yamada Naoko’s trinity of more ambitious, more artsy, more auteury work.
Feb 4, 2022
Koe no Katachi
(Anime)
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Recommended
spoiler warning
I was afraid to return to this movie. Like with any KyoAni work, it’s hard to watch art from people who have been brutally hurt. But not only that: I read the manga, the source material for this recently and it kinda sucked. The best parts of it was the character art, how it realistically captured the clumsiness and chaos of life and how it portrayed bullying: how you can ruin a person’s life so easily and cruelly and for little reason. Everything else left a bad taste in my mouth. The story wasn’t about a person living with deafness: we got so little ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Nov 26, 2021
Liz to Aoi Tori
(Anime)
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Recommended
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
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Nov 24, 2021
Heike Monogatari
(Anime)
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I’m so glad Yamada Naoko is alive.
Amidst the absolute worst circumstances, amidst brutish violence, amidst the burden that will continue to be carried every day, I can still be thankful that there were survivors of the KyoAni arson. I can be thankful that KyoAni are holding their heads up high, continuing to produce high-quality work, without cynicism, and as if completely unfazed. Despite occurring so close to the disaster, The Violet Evergarden movies were still released to the world in a wonderful state. The work's messages of living through trauma and bringing joy to the world through letters, through labours of love, couldn't have been ... more painfully thematic. The people of KyoAni were now facing a reality as cruel as that portrayed in Violet Evergarden, with soldiers dying on the front lines and their loved ones being left to mourn. DragonMaid Season 2 was meant to be directed by Yasuhiro Takemoto who died in the arson. Instead of cancelling the project, Tatsuya Ishihara took creative reign and delivered on something as optimistic and as thoughtful and as funny and as poignant as the first season. Takemoto’s legacy was eternalised, his name even appearing as the director in the show's opening credits. For these people, living day by day would be a difficult task, but they keep pushing themselves to bring us joy. They really don't have to, I want them to be safe and healthy foremost, but this is the path they've chosen. I'm so grateful and happy for that and I hope everyone's doing okay. And on that note, I’m so glad that Yamada is finding strength in expressing herself through new creative pursuits, even if that means cutting ties with KyoAni, whether that be temporarily or permanently. I made a video version of this review. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/1_1pAIcdL9g This review contains spoilers. For a read with less spoilers, please check out FANTAMELONSODA's fantastic review, who riffs on many of the same points I do in my review: https://myanimelist.net/reviews.php?id=421278 Heike Monogatari is an adaptation of a renowned Japanese story about two warring royal families, the Heike and the Minamoto. I usually would not give two shits about stories so forthright on politics and inane social structures but Yamada’s competency as a director makes this show immediately understandable and emotionally resonant, adopting a tone and subject she’s never even tackled before. Science Saru’s production staff are resourceful and passionate enough to sell Yamada’s vision, exercising clean, fluid movement and storyboarding. There couldn’t have been a better studio to collaborate with: one that’s all about progressing the medium to new heights. The show’s visuals sport her usual auteurist traits: pastels with flat, confident tonal work, digital compositing that mimics live-action camerawork, thematic use of landscapes, setting and place and a particular focus on human gesture. The designs of the characters are soft and expressive, creating a surprising amount of variance between a predominantly male cast. They’re also written and animated to be quite funny, showing Yamada and screenwriter Reiko Yoshida's penchant for great character and comedy writing developed at KyoAni. I love the clothing design, the huge, draping silhouettes and plush ornaments. I had a lot of fun being educated by this show. Exposition scenes are paired with engaging compositions and visuals. There’s great attention to detail put into portraying the dynamics of Japanese culture, combat and “spirituality” for a lack of a better bastardised term, such as the sacrilege of shooting a shrine during war, or the superstitions surrounding the deaths of certain characters. Kensuke Ushio is back for music. His score combines alt-rock, hip hop and electronic music with traditional Japanese instrumentation. It gives the show a hip, modernistic flair. It’s so exciting to see Yamada try new things and work with new people alongside her already established sensibilities, skillset and staff. But while I can be grateful as a consumer, great art is not an antidote to human suffering. There is no time machine to save the lives that have been lost. I cannot speak on the behalf of the people directly living with the pain of the arson everyday. Family members of the deceased, staff members who must carry on. I recognise how my commentary may be intrusive or voyeuristic towards the people I am discussing, prying into their personal business. Part of my motivation to write about this is to alleviate my own selfish pain regarding the situation. What is the “burden” of grief or death really? I barely understand these things myself. It’s a buzzword used to describe something so incomprehensibly terrifying. I can’t write about, let alone imagine, what it’d be like to work in this situation, but I want to make an effort to try. I wish to impart my utmost respect towards all affected parties and apologise for any fumbles in my writing. Heike Monogatari is a story about death. I was drawn to Yamada’s work for its tenderness, its cutesiness, its dedication towards rendering human emotion and physicality. Heike Monogatari opens with a child watching their father get sliced down by a samurai sword. This show is not about who wins or who loses these wars. In fact, the show partially spoils the demise of the Heike through Biwa’s future visions. This is a widely-read story in Japan after all, so the audience is expected to be familiar with the material. The main point is that violence isn't honourable in the slightest: death is an all-persisting force. Main characters die one after another, often to illness, self-sacrifice or suicide, but the show barely gives its characters time to wallow. Time skips ahead constantly, with characters ageing half-decades between episodes. There are decisions to be made and wars to be won. Action scenes aren’t driven by their action. Instead, emphasis is placed on unsightly imagery: arrows flooding the sky, men and horses falling from bridges and cliffs, the pooling of blood and the horrified reactions of those still standing. I felt uncomfortable from the amount of cities we see burn to the ground and how Yamada would feel having to depict them. It’s relentless. It’s pointless. It's as if Yamada is critiquing the era that birthed Heike Monogatari for its cruelty and expedient treatment of human life. The characters' obsession with glory, wealth and power is seen as hedonistic, greedy and ultimately self-destructive. There’s a sad absurdity in many of these scenes: a loveless arranged marriage, emperors drinking and dancing amidst the country’s ruin and a child being reigned as the new emperor before he even knows how to speak. Some children are even married off before they hit their teen years. These are truly pathetic people. The might of Yamada’s adaptation is in the thoroughness of the characterisation, how it sheds light on the unique faces and lives of the people being used as pawns. We see the family in their mundanity, their hobbies, their squabbles, their joy. We see a son of the Heike go mad with guilt for leading countless men to their deaths, his war makeup a mask for his shame. We see a woman refusing to be married off by her family as an asset, instead becoming a monk and abstaining from life’s pleasures. I’d imagine that the perspective of women is absent or sidelined from other Heike adaptations, but Yamada’s feminism once again shines through. Compassion helps make the world a little less bleak. The truly noble characters in this show are those who are able to let go: to forgive and accept the inevitable horror of life. Suicide is positioned as cowardly and a waste of one's life: there should be no shame in living after surrender. Tokuko’s character imparts the value of acceptance through all the marital bullshit she has to go through. The tiny fidgets of fingers and toes underneath her curtaining clothing expresses the pain underneath her unfaltering resolve. But she doesn’t melodramatically fight back against her shitty family to escape her arranged marriage. She’s wed off by the next episode and she peacefully resigns to her fate. The one video I did watch explaining the original Heike Monogatari’s themes outlined how it is a story about inevitable loss: what is gained one day can be taken away the next. Episode 1’s musical performance expresses this sentiment clearly: “The Buddha’s temple bells toll the message / that all existence is impermanent / the sal tree’s blossoms turn white to grieve him / a reminder that all who must flourish must fall.” The show is rampant with flower imagery and Biwa’s future self has white hair to represent the sal’s white blossoms. Speaking of Biwa, he’s a wonderful protagonist. Biwa is an additional character not actually included in the original tale. He’s an audience stand-in character, experiencing the events of the story unfold as a bystander. In historic Japan, biwas were street performers, usually people of low class, that would play their titular instrument and tell stories. Stories like Heike Monogatari gained cultural prominence because of this generational oral transmission. In Yamada’s adaptation, our protagonist Biwa is shown in the future retelling Heike Monogatari through musical performance. Biwa is an abandoned, powerless child. He can look into the future, see the Heike’s demise, the death of his loved ones, but can do nothing to stop it. He’s harrassed by the sons of Heike, for being an outcast, for being poor. The insipid gender expectations of the time again become a focus here. Biwa’s more androgonous than anything. I had a chat with user IshigamiCrisis who believes that Biwa should be addressed with masculine pronouns. I found a lot of legitimacy in their reading: Biwa is not a girl, but a boy. The characters insist on Biwa's physiology to define his identity, but Biwa's understanding of himself has been informed by the weight of his experiences. His father would intentionally dress him as a male as a means for survival. This act of changing one's identity out of necessity is now what Biwa prefers and feels most comfortable embodying. He wears men’s clothes. He’s obsessed with food, stuffing his face like a pig, holding onto the vitality of life. Aoi Yuuki breathes so much grit into the character with her husky, nasally voice. Biwa doesn’t have a home. His father’s dead, his surrogate father Shigemori also dies, the Heike eventually kick him out. He packs lightly, only needing his bindle and his biwa. Biwa searches for his mother, his last source of refuge, only to find out that she was the one who abandoned Biwa and his father in the first place. The two choke on the impossibility of their reunion. But there is solace in knowing that, despite life’s complete shittiness, the two hoped and intended the best for one another. That they can still love each other, even when coexistence isn’t possible. What can you do when you’re utterly powerless to do anything? Biwa’s mother: I couldn’t do anything. But I was always praying for you. Biwa: May [father] rest in peace. May he rest quietly. Even if you can’t do anything. Pray. Remember. Accept. Pray. Biwa’s storytelling gives meaning to the banality of the Heike’s experiences. The parallels between Biwa and Yamada are clear, who’s had to find a new home after working at KyoAni for almost two decades, who has to shoulder the weight of grief and death and loneliness. Both Biwa and Yamada are telling stories to sustain the memory of what has been lost, and so so much has been lost. Biwa’s character represents the pain surrounding this show’s production and the need to keep the memory of our loved ones alive. Adaptation is not about replication, but giving the source material new life and meaning through the creators’ own artistic vision and experiences. The mythology and figureheads surrounding Heike Monogatari are merely vessels that allow Yamada to communicate the weight of the arson’s aftermath. For as quiet and diligent KyoAni’s members have been towards publicly expressing their feelings, I think Heike Monogatari gives us some insight on that. It is about undeniable hurt, but also acceptance to get through the next day and the persistence to find the humanity in others. Giving up can be a form of resistance, of responsibility. But sometimes, even giving up isn’t enough for the pain to disappear. All I can do is hope everybody from KyoAni is getting proper help and to encourage them to keep fighting, to keep praying, to keep on living, in whatever way they find the most fulfilling. Tokuko was destined to drown with the others. In the final episode, Yamada speaks directly through her: “I enjoyed the beauty of the passing seasons, knowing neither hunger nor cold. To be placed in such glory and prosperity, it felt as if I were in heaven. I fled the capital, my clan, spent days in battle, and while at sea I could not even drink water. All living things must perish. I even saw my child’s life extinguish before my eyes. I have been put through every form of suffering in the human world. There is not a single one I do not understand. I too have feelings I cannot forget. And so I simply press my hands together and pray. I think of the ones I love and I pray for their happiness in the next world. That small act is what I can do.”
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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