A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Search This Blog

Sunday, June 8, 2025

Liz and the Blue Bird (Naoko Yamada, 2018)


Cast: voices of Atsumi Tanezaki, Nao Toyama, Miyu Honda, Konomi Fujimura, Yuri Yamaoka, Shiori Sugiura, Tomoyo Kurosawa, Ayaka Asai, Moe Toyota, Chica Anzai, Houko Kawashima, Yuichi Nakamura, Takahiro Sakarai. Screenplay: Reiko Yoshida. Cinematography: Kazuya Takao. Art direction: Mutsuo Shinohara. Film editing: Kengo Shigemura. Music: Akito Matsuda, Kensuke Ushio. 

A beautiful synchronization of image and music gives Naoko Yamada's Liz and the Blue Bird its special quality. It's a simple tale of two girls, a flutist and an oboist in their school orchestra, on the brink of one of life's early crises: the separation caused by graduation from the school where they had grown close. Their story is blended with the one in a book that bears the film's title, a fable about a girl who lives alone but one day is joined by a mysterious girl who is really a blue bird transformed into a human. Though they grow close, the lonely girl knows that the bird needs to fly free. Yes, the point of both the storybook version and that of the real girls is as banal as "If you love someone, set them free." But execution is everything in this case, and Yamada and her animators and composers rise to the task superbly.  

Posted by
Links: ,