“Students and best friends Mizore Yoroizuka and Nozomi Kasaki prepare to play a complex musical duet, “Liz and the Bluebird,” for oboe and flute. Though they play beautifully together and have been friends since childhood, Mizore and Nozomi find that with graduation looming and the duet proving difficult, their friendship begins to buckle under the pressure. Interspersed with their story is the fantasy of the tale of Liz, drawn like a storybook, contrasting the crisp realism of the school. These two distinct styles weave with stirring music to tell a touching coming-of-age story.” – Official Synopsis
Liz and the Bluebird is a slice-of-life anime film telling the story of two graduating friends.
Stories in the slice-of-life genre tend to be very literal. They commonly ask the question, “How do these characters react in this situation?” They’re kind of like anime sitcoms, but more mundane. They tend to require the audience understanding and appreciating the characters for their quirky behaviors.
With this solo film, the audience isn’t given enough time for these characters to grow on them in the same way. As such, the story of this film is about the character’s growth and similar abstract concepts. Because of this, you sort of need to think critically and empathetically through this film to understand what’s happening. I personally think that can make it more enjoyable.
Characters tackle a few different themes and change differently in response to them: realizing that sometimes you have to leave your friends, learning how to stand up for yourself, learning when and when not to be selfish, and what it means to rely solely on one person.
Both Mizore and Nozomi are the main characters. They both change over the course of the story. However, Mizore is the main character.
She changes the most over the film. The film also mostly follows her interactions with others and her feelings towards Nozomi.
Nozomi does change by the end of the film, but nowhere near as much. Mizore makes these grand leaps in personality and confidence. Nozomi ends the film still selfish and short-sighted, but now she realizes she needs to work on that.
The scene to scene actions were incredibly mundane and would be boring, if you didn’t have to read so much into the character interactions.
The scenes with the characters Liz and the Bluebird were interesting, as they broke up the mundane monotony and helped to punctuate what was happening between the main characters.
There were a couple of scenes I really enjoyed. First, was when the main characters weren’t playing their solo so well and one of the trumpets wasn’t afraid to let them know (Aside from the main characters, no character is referred to by name, off-screen, so I am going to refer to them by their instrument). During a break in rehearsal, Trumpet and her friend, Euphonium, decide to go out in the courtyard, where everyone can hear them, and play through the oboe and flute solo themselves.
There are a couple of things I found fun about this. One, they might have had to go through the effort to transpose the sheet music to play it in key on their instruments. Two, they weren’t playing with sheet music, which means that they rehearsed this to where they at least memorized it and then stepped out to flex on these upperclassmen.
Honestly, it’s so catty and real that I just love it.
The other scene I liked was when Mizore is making her own reeds for her oboe. A fair number of professional oboe players make their own reeds. It’s an interesting code for the audience to understand her dedication to playing the oboe. However, if you don’t know it, that could be lost.
The weakest part of this film, in my opinion, is the ending. They could have pulled a Whiplash and ended it immediately after the climax where the main character realizes how they need to change and then performs their piece spectacularly. However, Nozomi had no resolution at this point. She realized she was at fault, nothing was done about it, so they kept the story going.
The overdubbed lines didn’t exactly line up with the mouth movements. Which is fine. It’s not a Disney dub. It’s not the worst. It’s good enough.
There’s also some odd ticks in the voice acting. I don’t know where in the chain of command this problem would have happened, but it seems like the actors were performing too quietly. It was almost like they whispered half of their lines. This might be similar to the way the Japanese voice acting was. Either way, all I know is that it felt a little off.
The translation is almost too literal. The dialogue is stilted in ways that I assume come from direct translations. There’s a scene where they explain a Japanese cultural practice involving ice cream. When two people say the same thing at the same time, one of them says, “ice cream” and then the other one owes them ice cream.
It’s the Japanese version of “Jinx, you owe me a soda”.
Why they didn’t rewrite this as “Jinx” to easily make more sense, I don’t know. The best I can figure is that it would be weird writing to have a lore-dump on “Jinx”, but there may be English speaking areas that don’t have that.
This seems like a good translation but not a good localisation.
I feel like I am going to get on a soapbox about 3D models every time I review an animated feature. Thankfully, Liz and the Bluebird uses 3D models sparingly. There are some textures that are used as blankets. These look pretty bad, but they break up the flat, unpatterned monotony of most animated items. There’s also a book and some pufferfish that are 3D, and they’re only noticeable because they stretch strangely when they move.
3D models were mostly used in backgrounds. Which is fine, aside from the flat colored characters refusing to cohere with the textured background. The only background that looked bad was the street that Liz was walking down to get to work.
Speaking of Liz’s scenes, the watercolor backgrounds look great. If I was told that the layers were scans of actual watercolors I would believe it (There’s one scene where a cloud is moving across a stationary paper texture that would be my only source of doubt). Kind of like classic Scooby-Doo episodes, the differing style and media very clearly denote what is and isn’t in the background.
There’s a clip of a bluebird flying away that looks like it’s animated from frames of Rorschach tests. This clip is used as a sort of visual motif every now and again and it’s really cool. It reminds me of painterly animations of children’s books from the 70s or 80s.
Liz and the Bluebird also has a sort of “shot on a camera” aesthetic that I talked about in another review. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t really like it now. It works functionally because it allows the animation team to easily define what is in the background. To me it feels like there was less time spent making the backgrounds work with the characters and more time spent making the camera aesthetic work. Wasting time to find a shortcut, so to speak.
There’s also shots that look like were “taken” with a handheld camera. These don’t really do anything for me.
That being said, the cinematography was really interesting in this one. There were a lot of abstract shots. Mostly, these were extreme close-ups with an often dissonant composition. By “dissonant” I mean that they aren’t traditionally “good”; they don’t follow the rule of thirds, they don’t give space for the audience to follow the character’s line of sight, there’s a shot with a weird arrow in the background pointing at a character, etcetera.
These shots may not be that great in isolation, but they can be used effectively. If the cinematographer allows for an ebb and flow of dissonant and consonant shots, they can create a really interesting shift in mood.
Liz and the Bluebird has a fairly good flow in this regard. For one, they aren’t always doing extreme close-ups. Another is that Liz’s scenes are more consistently traditional, which allows for a subconscious divide between the two.
The dissonant shots also make it seem more honest. A lot of the extreme close-ups are during scenes when the characters are playing music. They seem to be using these shots to hide inaccurate fingerings on the instruments, which is much better than accidentally showing the wrong ones. The shot with the arrow I mentioned earlier could also be explained as, “We couldn’t get this shot without the arrow.” Even though it’s animated and everything was clearly decided beforehand, it makes the space more real.
With a film about musicians, the score itself has to be good, and Liz and the Bluebird has a good score. While I probably missed a few themes and motivic ideas, there are some interesting parts I noticed.
What I picked up as Mizore’s “themes” were often more genres and styles of music, as opposed to actual melodic motifs. At many times there are ambient sounds of what seems like a prepared piano (an innovation by John Cage, heard here). However, it could also be a heavily processed piano. Some of the range on certain pianos have a similar percussive timbre even before post-production.
Other times there are pieces that are very minimalist. As a note, minimalist music is a bit of a misnomer. These compositions tend to have a lot going on. There is often heavy repetition, a very clear beat pulse, and instruments flowing in and out. Of course, no one composer did anything the same way.
Minimalism is also commonly used in film scores as the style tends to evoke a mood. However, the pieces in Liz and the Bluebird I’m referring to are decidedly minimalist. They almost sound like Steve Reich pieces.
The piece “Liz and the Bluebird” is used interestingly. Mainly it is used as the theme for Liz, so whenever her scenes start, you hear the piece. This works well until the students are performing the piece diegetically off-screen. You expect to see watercolor backgrounds and Tudor-esque houses, not establishing shots of the inside of a Japanese high school.
The other double reeds’ theme is well done. When Oboe is first introduced, her theme is played by a solo oboe. When the Bassoons are introduced soon after, two bassoons begin to accompany the oboe in this arrangement. This is a really fun decision that only makes the score better. If the composer hadn’t decided to arrange the piece this way, the only thing they would stand to lose is what they could have gained.
While I don’t think the score follows Wagner’s ideal to the letter, the composer’s freedom definitely shows.
