Two girls work through their issues while honing their skills as musicians in 2018's Liz and the Blue Bird (リズと青い鳥). The deft touch of storytelling and insight into human nature recall Japan's golden age of filmmaking and the likes of Ozu and Naruse. It's a treat.
Mizore (Atsumi Tanezaki) and Nozomi (Nao Toyama) are members of their high school's concert band. Mizore plays the oboe and Nozomi plays the flute. The piece the band is currently practicing calls for a duet between their two instruments, symbolising the relationship between a woman named Liz and a bluebird that takes the form of a human girl. The music is based on a fairy tale which is shown as a film-within-a-film, depicting Liz as a young woman in a fantasy European town and the bluebird as a chipper girl with blue hair. Liz finds the girl injured one day and takes her into her home.
As someone who's worked in Japanese junior high schools for the past five and a half years and has frequently hung out with the school brass bands I can tell you the film is remarkably true to life. A lot of manga and anime are set in schools but rarely do they feel so authentic. I've known plenty of students like these. Mizore in particular is soft spoken in a way I very often see in life but rarely see in anime. There are many girls who rarely speak and when they do they can be very difficult to hear. This is often interpreted as shyness, and some of it is shyness, but a lot of it is tact.
I often see pairs of girls like Mizore and Nozomi. In America, too, it's not unusual for girls to have intensely important best friend relationships which you don't see among boys but I think such relationships are more important in Japan because of the collectivist nature of the culture. Looking for social guidance among peers is more important and the Japanese are much more afraid of embarrassment. So for many, having a best friend is a crucial life raft in the troubled sea of social interaction. I was impressed with how well the film captured this while also conveying a sense of just how new relationships with complex psychological depths are for the girls.
The movie is a spin-off of Sound! Euphonium, which I saw a few years before I came to Japan. You don't need to have seen the series to understand the film since it focuses on different characters but, for those who have seen the series, it's fun to spot the main characters in the background. It helps create the sense of a living world.
Liz and the Blue Bird is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Queersighted: Coming of Age playlist. The filmmakers have stated they did not intend the relationship between the girls to be homosexual. I suppose it's fair to read it that way though it's a bit like saying Frodo and Sam are gay in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe that's satisfying if it's what you're looking for but it misses the cultural differences between western culture to-day and the one Tolkien is depicting. The same goes for the differences between American and Japanese culture. The Japanese do many things Americans would regard as clearly homosexual. It's very common, for example, for boys to sit in each other's laps. But the Japanese don't see it as gay so, of course, it's not. I'm a firm believer in art being open to interpretation and of people being able to have multiple, valuable experiences for one work of art. But if you see Liz and the Blue Bird and Lord of the Rings as gay, you may be oversimplifying from your cultural perspective and missing a glimpse into another facet of possibility in human relationships.
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