[Februaryuri 2025] Liz and the Blue Bird (and more!)

30 Mar, 2025

(base post on Februaryuri¹ 2025 here!)

Liz and the Blue Bird (Rizu to Aoi Tori) (2018)

directed by Naoko Yamada, written by Reiko Yoshida, from a novel by Ayano Takeda, with music by Kensuke Ushio and Akito Matsuda

1 movie (1h30)

Summary

Mizore and Nozomi are both third-year high school students, close friends, and members of the wind band club of their school.
This year, their club will play the fairytale-esque musical piece of Liz and the Blue Bird. Though the two girls have a significant duet part together, they find themselves unable to play in sync, due to unspoken relationship problems.

This may be due to how Nozomi is envious of Mizore. Or how Mizore holds herself back to not outperform her. Or the unmended emotional wound of Nozomi temporarily leaving the club two years ago. Or the pressure of the approaching graduation and career choices. Or this may simply be due to Mizore's feelings for Nozomi...

Comment

This one is by far the most conventionally yuri-coded anime of this Februaryuri batch. It's also probably the softest and simplest - and I mean this for the better.
It's also the only one that isn't an anime original (see Extra section), but I felt compelled to put it here because of my own attachment to it.

I remember seeing Liz in theaters in late 2018, well before my own special interest for the yuri genre really bloomed. I remember being moved and happy about how strange it felt to see such a heartfelt, contemplative tale of sapphic pining - and for it to reach French theaters, too.

There's something beautiful to how atmospheric Liz is, with gorgeously colorful fairytale segments, minimalist ambient music contrasting with the evocative wind orchestra's piece, and the slow, introspective quality of its high school life. I also particularly remember the frequent and soft focus on little gestures and parts of the girls' bodies - hands, legs - and how it conveyed nervousness, emotion, attraction, and something strangely real and ethereal at the same time.

Now, with many more yuri read and seen, rewatching it felt admittedly a little less unique. I now trace a lot of it to high school yuri aesthetics - a story within the story, slow shots of empty classrooms, high school and the cusp of graduation... But still. There's definitely something special to how Liz nails all that, softly, without downside - featuring an intimate and gentle atmosphere that envelops you, a fairytale of a girl letting go of a girl-shaped blue bird that is definitely a sapphic love story, and Naoko Yamada's clear attention to small details and body language.

Liz tells a story through music and silence and mostly unspoken feelings. This may make it occasionally confusing or hard to follow: we do not access the characters' thoughts, and they sometimes voice their feelings in roundabout ways through ambiguous conversations; and ultimately a lot of Liz's yuri story needs you to read between the lines. But this also constitutes part of the movie's realism, somehow: a story of a lesbian love never outright stated but very much there, the kind of quiet heartbreak that exists in silences.

Extra

I have a decent amount of extra elements to mention here! With extra pictures!

Sound! Euphonium

The most directly relevant is probably that Liz and the Blue Bird originally emanates from the Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium) light novel series by Ayano Takeda. A good portion of it was adapted into anime, with a third season that aired recently. Liz and the Blue Bird is technically a spinoff of its universe, adapting the ninth volume, which focuses on the otherwise more secondary characters of Mizore and Nozomi, thus allowing it to be a standalone movie. Still, references in the movie make it clear it is part of a wider fiction, and you may indeed be able to recognize other more prominent characters from the Sound! Euphonium series in it.

Most of the light novels don't seem to have been translated to English (or French, for that matter), so if you're curious about the source material and not just the anime series adaptation, you may be interested in this fan-translation of the novels by Team Oumae, including here (the second book presented in the post, labeled part 2) the volume that ultimately yielded the scenario of Liz and the Blue Bird.

I have yet to watch the Sound! Euphonium anime myself, though I am curious. For years, it has been infamous as the epicenter of much debate regarding subtext and yuri bait. To my understanding, this was due to the anime having some absurdly yuri-coded scenes (it's seriously as gay as it gets), amping up a yuri vibe already present in the novels, while still having to branch back into the story said novels ultimately told, with some of the seemingly pretty gay girls actually having a boyfriend at some point. This made the second season of the series a pretty intense "straightening" of what appeared at first as something really, really lesbian - which understandably made a lot of its queer audience furious at the time. This article on Anime Feminist by Misty Schulz is a very insightful telling of it all.
Still, in some yuri ways, it feels like Sound! Euphonium walked so that Liz and the Blue Bird could fly. And aside from that, I have heard much praise of it as a series, if you enter it knowing what you will get and engage with it on its own terms. This AnimeNewsNetwork post that was released as Sound! Euphonium's third season rolled in is a particularly great analysis of why queerbaiting may often be a reductive lens - and here thrown as a label that flattens the series' strengths into discourse fodder, even with an understandable anger from the bait & switch it operates and a need for more sapphic love stories.

Flower and Asura

If I may say so, works that are really yuri, but in the sense that they explore the deepest reaches of "subtext" - to the point where it's 100% text except it's not addressed as explicitly romantic by the characters in the rest of the story - seem to be Ayano Takeda's wheelhouse. I recently had the pleasure to watch Flower and Asura (Hana wa Saku, Shura no Gotoku), an anime adaptation of an eponymous manga written by Takeda, about a broadcasting club and public readings. The series roughly adapts the first five volumes of the manga, and I will definitely continue this in manga form out of interest (and maybe post about it at some point).

The anime version has a great, soft art style, and is overall really sweet and nice! It also has a good cast and a very relatable lead full of insecurities and quiet self-hate. It is also very, very yuri, with some scenes that scream gay in bold, capital letters, between the main character and the deuteragonist (and also a third girl at some point a little), without ever being exactly romance.
This reaches the point where it's, like, canon the two leads are into each other somehow... but they're just not addressing the heavy romantic undertones of their relationship for some reason. And, you know, I feel so many things with this - joy that it gets space to be represented as it is, at least in some ways; some anger to not get something explicitly labeled as romantic or at any point considered under a romantic lens by the character themselves; the ever-present fear that people may discredit it as friendship; elation because it's still really fricking gay... It's a lot.

Honestly, it's almost its own kind of art to have something this clearly sapphic-coded, this many times without it ever being directly addressed as romantic and the idea of dating never being present in the fiction. There are essays that could be written on how notions like "subtext" and "text" feel reductive when you reach a certain depth of yuri, where romantic relationships between girls just don't get to enter the scope of the fiction for some reason but the lesbian pining sure as hell is there. It's a strange place to be in, with lots of feelings involved. I definitely plan to write more about that (and maybe on Flower and Asura's soft handling of self-hate, too).

The same series also contains a reference to another of Takeda's writings, the novel Blue Spring (Aoi Haru wo Kazoete). It isn't translated into English to my knowledge but it does seem really yuri-coded too, considering it is used as a springboard for a very yuri-coded scene in Flower and Asura by reciting one of its sections.
In itself, Flower and Asura makes me want to read more of my writings aloud, and to think about yuri and sapphic representation some more, and these are great feelings to have.

A few words on Yamada and Yoshida

Now, aside from all this, I must also talk more about Naoko Yamada and Reiko Yoshida, who are two prominent figures in Japanese animation² - notably as women in directing and script writing, two lines of work that are sadly still very male-dominated to my understanding. Both have impressive lists of well-known anime titles they worked on³; and have notably collaborated on several of them.
This includes band girls anime reference K-On! (that I have yet to watch), anime movie A Silent Voice (which sadly felt very ableist to me), Liz and the Blue Bird (this rec!), historical anime series The Heike Story (which was a very accessible version of the Heike Monogatari historical Japanese epic), and most recently their latest feature film, The Colors Within (Kimi no Iro).

The last part of this post will be a more detailed and enthusiastic review of The Colors Within, that I watched at the start of this month of March. It will just be me getting enthusiastic about that movie, because it released last year and I got the chance to see it in early March, eager to see what another collab between Yamada and Yoshida would look like... And it was really sweet!

The Colors Within

So. The Colors Within. With a setting in an all-girls Christian school and a synesthete protagonist who sees people as colors and who is enthralled by a classmate's color, I was buckling up for something rather yuri at first, because the first third sure checks some of the genre's historical roots bingo card.

What I got instead was three cute teens, two girls and a boy, forming an impromptu band to play Christian rock... and you know, I ended up being all here for it.
The three characters' friendship is charming, I can't help but read them all as kinda queer, and, I don't know, there's just something extremely soothing to the movie's soft color palette and aesthetic and framing - notably, as in Liz, with Yamada's attention to small expressions and subtle moments. The entire movie really makes for something sweet and gentle to vibe to (if you can accept the very prevalent Christian school, and generally Christian, setting).

The score, too, made by Kensuke Uchio - just like the more quiet and evocative high school parts of Liz - is perfect for the ambience of the movie. It's also particularly striking when it ventures into the three very distinct songs the three leads get to compose, one each, with three whole vibes that really capture their voices. I was not expecting a full concert in this movie, but gosh did it knock my socks off. Some of its other, quieter scenes are also very atmospheric, and clearly stayed with me as the credits rolled out.
All this additionally introduced me to the theremin, which is one hell of a strange sci-fi-looking instrument, and I'm really fascinated by it.

Overall, let me put this recommendation on top of Liz and the Blue Bird itself. The Colors Within is not yuri, but it still feels a bit yuri-coded at times, and ends with a friendship trio that even has room to be read as a little polycule to me (or not - we're also in dire need of tales of friendship!).
It's also simply a soft story that helped me get a bit out of the depth of the Winter months, with strangely catchy religious rock songs I did not expect to have on loop. Just as in Liz, some of the interactions may feel a bit vague at times, with an unspoken introspective vibe; but it makes for a very relaxing tale: one of finding your people, and finding yourself in the process. One about making art together for the sheer joy of self-expression.

#februaryuri 2025 #yuri