*Spoilers below

Liz To Aoi Tori is in my opinion, Yamada Naoko’s magnum opus. Its melancholic execution of strong friendships combined with a take on music I haven’t seen before in modern media make for a perfect movie. I’ll split up my thoughts into a few sections.

Friendship:

I strongly relate to Mizore’s introverted personality, as I have been a rather soft-spoken person for a good chunk of my life. Sometimes, people don’t understand my desires in a given moment, because I’m as awkward as Mizore was, and just like Mizore, I hold my close friends very dear to my heart. Perhaps my friends had other things to do, but I always wanted to hang out with them, and a lot of the times, I couldn’t bring myself to impose upon them, in fear that they might hate me for doing so. I also think of myself as an overly “kind” person, willing to sacrifice my own time and desires to make others happy, which relates to Mizore holding herself back to allow Nozomi to keep up, in a way.

Despite being a story about teenagers, this movie depicts friendship in such a mature way, using the story of “Liz and the Blue Bird” as a compliment to what Mizore and Nozomi went through together throughout the course of the movie.

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Music:

As a child, I played the piano because it was an extra-curricular activity my parents chose for me. I played piano in competitions and every year, did an exam in order to proceed to the next grade level in the “RCM system”. Over the years as I neared the end of the RCM system, my interest in playing waned, maybe because my schoolwork started piling up. I got quicky frustrated when I couldn’t play a certain section of a piece properly. I really wanted to quit. I didn’t understand what I was playing for. My parents, who wanted me to pass the final exam, and were paying for my lessons? That is what I believed, that I had to make my parents proud, so I pushed through, no matter how much I didn’t want to play.

I didn’t really understand the meaning of playing music until I listened to more of it. Music is like words, or perhaps even a language, it conveys your feelings, and people can understand the player’s feelings once they listen to it. It is an art form, and its underlying theme is human interaction.

Seeing and hearing Mizore and Nozomi play in that final sequence touched me in a way I haven’t really felt before. It further emphasized how feelings can be conveyed through a couple minutes of music. Mizore couldn’t articulate what she wanted in words, but through her oboe, that was possible. The movie really articulated the true meaning of what music can be, and I for one, really appreciated it.

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The movie itself is very quiet and melancholic, and it could be boring for some, but it was one of the most meaningful pieces of media I have ever consumed. The friendship between Mizore and Nozomi felt so strong, yet so fragile that perhaps just a light tap would make all the building blocks just fall apart. It related to me on such a personal level that I did feel a ton of emotion of watching this, and it really had me in the happiest of tears possible. This is a movie I won’t soon forget, and I’m oh so grateful that anime can do such amazing things when it tries.