This anime recommendation was from a popular Malaysian forum whose tastes in film I usually find execrable. I decided to give this a chance as it has decent reviews. Initial impressions based on its cast of stock high school characters and a very generic story within a story seemed at first to point towards a middling film but it soon turned out to be subtler and more intelligent than I had suspected.

Mizore and Nozomi are two girls who are both in their final year of high school as well as members of the school’s concert band. While Nozomi is outgoing and popular, Mizore is quiet and introverted, seeming to have no friends apart from Nozomi. The band is due to perform a musical piece that is adapted from a children’s story that Nozomi likes, the eponymous Liz and the Blue Bird. Mizore is drawn to it as well and instantly sees parallels in the story about a lonely young woman named Liz who shelters a blue bird but one day has to decide to let it go free with her own relationship with Nozomi. When the teachers press them on their plans after graduation, Mizore feels listless and directionless but when Nozomi announces that she may enroll in music school, she immediately wants to do the same. The concert performance calls for a duet by Mizore on the oboe and Nozomi on the flute but both the teachers and the other band members notice flaws in their playing and realize that the two need to resolve the fundamental conflict in their relationship in order to improve.

The art here is the usual hand-drawn style reminiscent of watercolors. It looks pleasant and beautiful of course but also very inoffensively generic. All of the scenes take place either inside the school or in the colorful fairy-tale world of the story within the story, so there is nothing particularly special or spectacular. This is why my initial impression of it was underwhelming especially as there are so many shots of Mizore downcast eyes, the swirling skirts of female students and walking feet. Fortunately the story defies and subverts the usual expectations of the familiar parable of letting the one you love go free and its portrayal of the emotions of the two main characters is unusually intricate and insightful. I understand that this was a side-story expanded from the original source material of a light novel and subsequent manga and anime adaptations, but that is almost irrelevant as both of these characters play only minor roles in the original versions. I also note that this was made by the same creative team of director Naoko Yamada and scriptwriter Reiko Yoshida who also made A Silent Voice, another of the rare anime films that I actually liked.

Back then I noted that both are women and speculated on how this affected the film. Here it’s striking that every character of note is female. There are male music teachers and conductors but they’re not significant characters. Also notable is that while there is nothing overt and certainly nothing explicit, there are strong hints that the relationship between Mizore and Nozomi is lesbian in nature. Their outings with each other feel like dates and the intimacy of their hugs and caresses seems more than mere friendship. Probably this is as far as they dare to go in a mainstream film but it is still rather surprising and adds an extra dimension to the relationship between the two girls.

There’s only so far that you can go with these Japanese high school animes and this is based on material original material written for young adults. Within the constraints of the genre however this represents an excellent effort and I love how much care and attention the creative team put into fleshing out the emotional lives of these young women.