without even being aware of what Liz was about beyond "anime", I was going into this fully aware of its adoring fans and reputation around people on letterboxd. i partially expected to either adore this or fucking despise it, but coming out of it i just sort of think this was just pretty solid, without much deeper to it than that. its overtly sentimental, heavily stylised and has a soundtrack that just doesn’t fucking relent for its entire runtime, ranging on a wide spectrum of melodramatic to very quiet, from well-orchestrated to unlistenable, and sometimes they even threw in motifs that sounded like what you would hear in a sitcom when a fat person was lumbering around. it’s clearly going for a soft, minimalistic atmosphere where it lets its technical aspects work the heavy lifting and allow its characters to breathe and flow within it, which I'm okay with, but it's used to an extent to where its calm atmosphere is the whole point of the movie, where the whole sense and tone of the film is communicated within the first 15 minutes. that isn't to say i wanted a whole high-stakes dramatic conclusion to this - though a better, more thought out ending would have been appreciated - because i genuinely found myself feeling endeared by its minimalism at moments, where instead of just feeling like a mood piece, the technical aspects and the characters actually worked off of each other, and created a genuine moment of tender kindness, specifically the scene where Mizoku talks about releasing the blue bird (her one scene of characterisation), cut with matching dialogue from nozomi, which as cliche of a moment as it sounds, I actually quite liked how it came out; it was still an overbearingly blunt scene that built so heavily off of the annoyingly overexplained central metaphor, but through a divine miracle there was a few minutes where the film worked harmoniously and it felt like a genuine moment of warmth rather than a feeling conveyed through insistence, something the film tried to do a lot with its atmosphere.

i appreciate its goal of simplicity within itself, because it isn't a story that can be told as something highly dramatised; in concept this isn’t a million miles away from the story of drifting apart through change that All About Lily Chou-Chou had, exploring its idea through music. both are entirely different films in execution, but the presentation of both for a concept that is the same, being focused on its music but also being notably a quiet, partially minimalistic look at its narrative. that sort of tone works well in a story that is inherently something cerebral and sad to go through, losing one you feel deep connections with and the complexities within each. the key difference between the two films however, is Chou-Chou takes its time to understand the people within the film as its focal point, whereas Liz's focus on creating the atmosphere to do the heavy lifting drags down a lot of the characters within the film to feel underdeveloped. communication is largely non-verbal within the film, which winds up becoming washed away by the setting which overbears a lot of the sequences within the film. its an issue in the real-world narrative, and even worse of an issue within the fantasy narrative, where their existence as the heavy handed symbolism within the film becomes genuinely obnoxious. mizoku and nozomi both suffer from this issue as well, mizoku to a far worse extent as the quieter character within the film; her presentation as shy becomes more of looking like a wet sponge for a heavy portion of the film, and nozomi carries all the weight of the characterisation between the two in a way where the film starts to feel like a mess, of a friendship i found myself not believing ever existed because the presentation of it couldn't convey the depth it wanted to.

i am glad i saw this because honestly it wasn’t as awful as i had partially suspected from its opening sequence, but it also was not as life changingly beautiful as id heard from a lot of people. there is a fantastic 30-40 minute animated short buried somewhere within here, and i cant help but feel disappointed that the 90 minute form this film exists in is what it turned out as.

and as with all films, the presence of a Pitbull soundtrack would have fixed this whole film.