LGM Film Club, Part 517: Liz and the Blue Bird

Last night, I watched the 2018 Naoko Yamada directed anime, Liz and the Blue Bird. It’s a very obvious metaphor about two high school girls. One is social, one is not. They are both pretty good musicians. One of the lead flautist and the other the lead oboe player. The flautist is moving on. The oboist, who doesn’t really talk to other people, is very much not. The lesbian overtones seem overwhelming to me, but I think that’s me projecting American gender norms onto a homosocial society like Japan. They are prepping for a big orchestra competition based on a composition that is the title of the film. That’s an adaptation of a story about a shy lonely girl who captures a blue bird that turns into her best friend. Can she let the bird go?

Overall, I found the film so obvious and unchanging over time that I didn’t care for it that much. The animation is pretty great though. One thing however–it really got at the ways in which different musicians need to be able to communicate with each other on the same page if they are really going to nail the piece, which is a big plot point as the growing distance between the two characters makes it hard for them. So it’s a good intro into an idea within classical music, even if that’s hardly the point of the film.