The 2019 Academy Award nominees for best animated feature include an anime!
In fact, it includes the first anime nominee not from Studio Ghibli!
And you know, I’m not actually that excited.
First there’s the fact that this was inevitable ever since GKids slid their way into the Oscars – it was only a question of when they’d decide that one of their anime releases would benefit the most from the exposure. More than that though, this is just a really good lineup all around. Incredibles 2 was full of marvelously fun layouts, Isle of Dogs showed once again that Wes Anderson’s real element is animation, and Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse is the first American mainstream animated feature in a very, very long time to make me say “wow, these guys really love cartoons!”
The Spiderman movie especially is delightfully innovative aside from being just a really tight story full love for the medium, and I almost included a writeup on it in the article as a joke. It would’ve been good too, since I’d have talked about how it takes techniques from Japan like frame modulation and a certain style of effect animation named after a guy named Yoshinori Kanada. I didn’t though. My self-indulgence does know some bounds, as incredible as that may seem as you read what I did write.
The only one I didn’t see was Ralph Breaks the Internet, which…seems like a “my friends worked on this so I’m going to vote for it” nomination, but I guess I oughtn’t say that. Either way, it’s still a nice bunch.
It was a very good year for anime film too – both in general and in the US. Eight anime were eligible for 2018, and more than that were in theaters at some point or another. Most of them were alright or better – a few were brilliant.
–but before we get to it, a word on the movies that aren’t appearing in this article:
You’ll notice that I’m only talking about six movies here, which is because I missed out on two of them (and was unable even to pirate them afterwards). The first was a Franco-Japanese co-production called Mutafukaz, but that name was just way too cool for America so we called it MFKZ here instead. France and Japan have produced things together before, and their industries have only grown closer over the years. The other was The Laws of the Universe: Part 1, which I’m really looking forward to because I hear it’s so terrible. The only thing you need to know is that it was funded by a cult called Hаpрy Sciеnсe, which is both more wacky than Sсiеntolоgy and, somehow, even more insidious too. I’d never have paid money to see it even if I’d noticed the screening.
Some other non-eligible movies which did appear in theaters were Mazinger Z: Infinity, Free! Take Your Marks, and Haikara-san: Here Comes Miss Modern Part 1-2. In order: Mazinger Z: Infinity was good but means more to fans of Mazinger Z, the Free! movie was cute but means more to fans of Free!, and Haikara-san was a rigid adaptation of a period piece whose rigidity and uninspired production doomed it to mediocrity.
Lastly, I should mention that Dragon Ball Super: Brolly did technically premiere in December 2018, but it didn’t open wide until 2019. I’m hoping that means it’ll be eligible for next year, because that was a very entertaining movie even to someone who knows basically nothing about Dragon Ball. Dudes punching each other through glaciers as a chorus dramatically chants “BROLY! BROLY! BROLY!” is pretty universal.
Anyway,
Mirai
Mirai is the movie GKids pushed for their slot in the Best Animated Feature category, and I think it was a smart move. It isn’t a classic Parent Anime, but it’s aimed so perfectly at the Parent Anime demographic that Mamoru Hosoda’s claim that he made this movie for his son is either hilariously devoid of self-awareness, or else just plain cynical.
Much of that appeal is bound in the premise, which is very simple and appealing. It’s a movie which seriously attempts to engage with the feelings of a 4 year old boy named Kun, whose parents just had another baby, using a sequence of visual metaphors which a 4 year old might imagine. The movie is structured episodically, with each episode dealing with a different subject, and using a new visual metaphor. A good early one has Kun, who feels the new baby has displaced him, fancy himself meeting a disfavored prince in a courtyard. As they talk, he realizes that the prince is in fact the dog, who complains that his food has been cheaper ever since Kun arrived in all his maleficence to darken that noble family’s doorstep.
(It’s okay, they become friends!)
It sounds wonderfully unique, and it…shouldn’t. Insofar as it’s a movie about seriously engaging with the feelings of a 4 year old, there is fundamentally nothing that this movie does that Arthur at its best did not do just as well. That’s not for nothing, of course, since Arthur could be excellent at times.
The difference between Arthur and Mirai is visual, broadly speaking, and what a difference! Kun’s father is an architect, and he designed the house they live in. I don’t know how nice the house would be to live in or maintain with all that glass, but it’s a filmmaker’s dream and allows lots of really nice blocking and layouts. This is good, since those are Hosoda’s strength, and most of the movie takes place inside the house. His direction is fun to watch, and some nice but unremarkable character animation only helps.
The movie really rests on those visual metaphors though, and unfortunately, they’re also my main problem: it’s all too fantastically whimsical. This isn’t how childhood memories are, and this mostly isn’t how children’s imaginations work. Fantastic whimsy is how imaginative romantics think children’s imaginations are like. The whole premise of the movie is dishonest, but at least it’s dishonest in the same way as most similar media is.
Still, I find myself in the awkward position of recommending a movie while seeming to condemn it. The premise may be dishonest, but Hosoda’s imagination is fantastic, and his vignettes are nothing if not heartfelt and personal. While it’s only somewhat insightful about 4 year old boys, it’s accidentally quite insightful about parents of 4 year old boys.
-which, come to think of it, probably says as much about the movie as I just did in the last few hundred words.
Fireworks
One of the few things I actually remember about Fireworks is that the screening I attended had the first six minutes of The Night is Short, Walk on Girl! attached to the end, and that there was more life in those six minutes than in 90 minutes of Fireworks.
It’s not a very good movie.
But it doesn’t do for me to just damn it; I have to actually tell you what it’s like. That’s really hard, because it’s so unmemorable, and I’m not going to rewatch it just to write a few hundred words about it for Facebook – not even at 2x speed.
To start, this is a romance with magical realism adapted from a live action TV series directed by Shunji Iwai in the early 90s that is, I hear, actually good. The movie was announced in December 2016. The perceptive may notice that its announcement followed only six months after the opening of the 9th highest grossing non-English film ever made, Your Name, which is a romance with magical realism. Just like Your Name, Fireworks was funded in part to promote a single. While the movie was not a success, the song miraculously was, and it was absolutely unavoidable in Japan for a period.
You might assume that Fireworks is cashing in on Your Name hype, but much to Shaft and Kadokawa’s ceaseless terror, that’s not the case. This movie had been in production since around 2013. In case you’re wondering, let me just confirm this for you right now: 4 years is not a reasonable amount of time for an anime film to be in production. 3 years would not have been a reasonable amount of time. 2 years is quite leisurely. The production of Your Name took about a year, with an additional year of pitching, business arrangements, and pre-production. Moreover, this movie did not take 4 years because Shaft was taking extra care to make sure it was good. This movie took 4 years because Shaft is burning hollow, and they do not have the resources to properly work on all the projects that Aniplex has foisted on them. I expect Fireworks to be the last movie they ever make.
Still, Fireworks isn’t bad because it has to grow in the shadow of Your Name, or even because its production was a mess; it’s bad because it’s a bad movie. You can divide it into two parts: the parts that are bland, and the parts that are distinctive but eye-rolling.
The love itself is one of the bland parts, which is, now that I’ve written those words, one of the most damming things you can say about a love story. It’s a story about a girl whose family circumstances prevent her from dating a guy she likes, which is odd, because the whole movie is told from the guy’s perspective. If the movie insists on framing the girl as purely an object of the boy’s empathy, then at least they ought’ve had the two interact more than marginally before launching into the third act so we can grow to like her ourselves. Instead, the emotional core of the story is distant, which makes the fact that the back half of the movie is a sequence of two teenagers being total jerks to their friends and family in a boring, myopic sort of way all the more painful. The movie, of course, isn’t reflective about their behavior in the slightest.
If the love story is one of the bland parts, the direction is nothing if not distinctively eye rolling. The movie was directed by Nobuyuki Takeuchi – a man who ought to have know better – at a studio called Shaft. Shaft since the mid 2000s has been an experiment to see if a single auteur can impart his vision on a studio of multiple other directors. The auteur in question is Akiyuki Shinbou, whose visual language is a development of the Dezaki school. It’s hard to describe the Dezaki school in words, but it’s a heightened, dramatic, abstract way of directing – and people like Shinbou take this already heightened style and heighten it even more. Sometimes it works out well. The visual language of Fireworks, however, is a bit like a fantasy novelist trying to write in Tolkien’s voice, but who understands none of his substance. It’s like if you opened The Hobbit and the first chapter is written in the same register as The Book of Genesis. Instead of the grandiose romanticism of Rose of Versailles, Fireworks is full of the same uncanny foreboding as Puella Magi Madoka Magica. This is 100% unintentional. I do not understand how Takeuchi got it so wrong.
I realize that it feels like I’m midway through a longer essay, but I really do want to keep these short snapshots unless they really warrant more, and this movie really doesn’t. If I did go on, I’d probably talk about:
>The horniness the storyboarders seem to have for the girl, which would be totally normal in, say, the Monogatari series, but is totally out of place in a by-the-numbers romance.
>The ugly compositing and cold, boring animation, which would be unremarkable even by TV production standards.
>How rote the big musical number is, visually, from a director who – and I stress this again – is great at bombastic, inventive visual design in literally every other thing he’s been involved with.
Don’t watch Fireworks. Just watch the music video and be done with the whole thing.
A note on the Year of Yuasa
Masaaki Yuasa is a visionary, which was as clear when he was an animator as it is now that he is a director running the studio Science Saru. I am not wholly a proponent of his vision, but he is a visionary, and this year, three of his anime came out in the US. Two of them – The Night is Short, Walk on Girl!, and Lu Over the Wall – were eligible for a nomination. The third was Devilman: Crybaby, which is a Netflix original anime series. Three anime is kind of a lot, and they’re vaguely thematically related, so I’m going to take a moment to introduce Yuasa at length.
When talking about Yuasa, you have to start with his visual style, because his style as an animator and his style as a director are inseparable. This makes him an auteur, and a good example of why individual animators are important to questions of authorship in the Japanese animation industry. He likes exaggerated poses, walk cycles, and movement in general which communicate emotion and weight, which is different from the character-focused exaggeration common in the West, or the snappy pose-to-pose exaggeration common in some anime. He uses wild camera movement and angles to accentuate it. He’s unafraid to make his characters look grotesque in the process, which makes him highly distinctive in an industry which is deeply in love with cute cartoon people.
Perhaps predictably, he likes nonhuman, monstrous characters a lot, and all three of his anime this year feature them. Moreover, two of them are meditations on some of mankind’s darker tendencies, with the underlying theme that monstrous and alien things aren’t always bad. Their plots are both broadly about ordinary people reacting poorly in understandable ways and causing catastrophes. Devilman: Crybaby ends in the same brutally pessimistic way as the manga it adapts did (yes I know this is a loaded contention, but let it slide for now), but Lu Over the Wall does not. I’m thankful for this because I found Devilman: Crybaby in many ways unpleasant, but I also wonder if Lu Over the Wall really provides a satisfying answer. The Night is Short, Walk On Girl! falls outside this pattern for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.
Last, I ought to mention that both movies – but especially Lu Over the Wall – are showcases of what Science Saru has been trying to do with the Flash animation toolchains they’ve been working on for a long while. Flash has the benefit of allowing animators to more easily animate scenes with lots of moving camera – which is important to Yuasa – and the drawback of making those scenes look floaty and weird. I suspect most of the work they’ve done has gone into solving that issue, which they haven’t yet. Nonetheless, if you read the credits to Lu Over the Wall, you’ll notice that there are no in-betweeners credited. There are only the key animators – who likely drew all the frames of their own cuts themselves – and Flash animators. An unusual production for an unusual director.
The Night is Short, Walk on Girl!
The Night is Short, Walk On Girl! is simultaneously a highly literary movie, and a story that was always meant for animation. That isn’t as strange as it sounds, since it’s an adaptation of a novel by Tomohiko Morimi, whose style could not be more perfect to attract animators and animation fans. I myself regret that I can’t quite read his work in Japanese quite yet, and hope someday I may. All the context you need, however, is that four of his works have been adapted into anime so far, and all of them have been great.
I’m not sure how to describe this movie, except that it’s about a girl who gate-crashes a bunch of parties, wins a drinking contest with a youkai, goes used book shopping, pinches in for a guerilla theater troupe, and cheers everyone up when they all get the same cold, all in the course of what I suppose must be an ordinary summer night in Kyoto. A boy follows closely behind, trying to confess his feelings. Just like the eternal night, the 92 minute movie feels about twice that long: not because it’s dull, but because it’s an episodic movie so dense with ideas that time seems to slow.
Note how I didn’t say what it’s about thematically. It’s about so many different things that I’m not sure what to say, and at any rate, really getting into it would require more time and space than this context allows. It’s a movie of vaguely related observations about life philosophies tied together in a bundle. If I had to name its primary through-line, it’s about the girl and the boy finding themselves, which sounds trite but isn’t. I suggest reading any number of other analyses if you’d like to know more.
Essential to this movie’s identity is the fact that animation is woven in to the warp and woof of Masaaki Yuasa’s directorial style. I can’t think of another anime director working right now who uses visual abstraction quite as aggressively and playfully as Yuasa, and it suits the abstract and playful story not only in the vague aesthetic sense that Morimi’s prose has an affinity for Yuasa’s visual language, but also in the more definite sense that Yuasa needed to articulate both concepts and sensations without relying on dialog or even some traditional storytelling tools.
Now, earlier I said that GKids running Mirai was a good idea, and I’ll even add that it probably has the most to gain by broader awareness. Nonetheless, I have a vague feeling that The Night is Short, Walk On Girl! has the potential to be a pretty big hit with someone, but I’m not sure exactly who that someone is. It’s too weird to be Parent Anime. It doesn’t walk or talk like anime, but since anime is not nearly the anathema to general audiences that watched DBZ and Naruto and Attack on Titan growing up, that might actually be a disadvantage outside the Parent Anime demographic. It’s not so weird that only film nerds would watch it, but then, it’s still experimental animation. In the end, the only way to be sure it reaches someone would be to throw it up on Netflix, which I’m sure will happen. Maybe it’ll even reach you.
Lu Over the Wall
Another thing about Masaaki Yuasa is that he likes dancing and music. Lu Over the Wall features lots of both, being about some kids in a band and a singing mermaid.
Actually, “merfolk” doesn’t get the right picture across. They’re more like magical vampire mermaids, which sounds like something extremely tedious off the late 2000s internet like “zombie pirate ninja,” but is perfectly accurate. They can manipulate water, they burn in sunlight, and you turn into a mer yourself if they bite you. Moreover, the most anthropomorphic mer is Lu; the rest are kinda like shark people. They’re tied to music, and they gain legs to walk on (or more usually dance across) land when they hear it. They’re pretty nuts, is what I’m saying.
Anyway, the movie introduces the depressed main character Kai and his two friends who rope him into being in a band. Kai discovers the mermaid child Lu when she’s attracted to his music, and they become friends. In the process we learn why Kai was dead to the world and about the lives of his two friends, and then watch as these people and the community they live in accidentally fuck everything up by acting painfully consistent to their established characters. This goes on for a very frustrating half hour or so of film until everyone manages to get their shit together in a big, strange, and pretty fucking neat looking finale with floating cubes of water and stuff. All told, I came away roughly satisfied, and…
…and I’m not sure I have much more to say about it than that, except that it’s like a way better version of Ponyo for an older audience. As I mentioned before, it veers away at the last minute from falling into shockingly dark nihilism for a movie about some dorks and a mermaid child. And yet, it’d be a kid’s movie, except for the fact that most kids would find the teenagers deadly boring. More than that, a lot of the best and most emotionally affecting parts are about old people who aren’t even the focus of the story. Maybe the highest complement I can give Yuasa and his staff is that somehow, nonetheless, it never became an atonal mess. It is aesthetically quite cohesive. Maybe I’d be more impressed if it didn’t have to go up against Yuasa and Morimi’s Kyoto Party Night 2018.
Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
aka “Call Your Mom: the Movie”
Mari Okada is the kind of writer who can have the whole theater laughing at a line that is clearly supposed to be serious one moment and near breaking down crying another…in the same scene. This is her best work.
This is a movie about the lives of an Iorph girl named Maquia and a human boy named Ariel. The Iorph are elves, more or less, and live secluded on an island where they produce fine textiles and frolic through the meadows all day for centuries on-end, as off-brand elves do. Maquia, being young and fragile, does less frolicking than others, but she watches others frolic with some reticence. Unfortunately, some shit involving dragons and geopolitics happens and she ends up orphaned very suddenly on the mainland, where she finds the human baby Ariel among the wreckage of a bandit raid, is adopted by some farmers, and becomes in turn a sister, a single mother, a single mother who may as well be a sister, and a grandmother.
Let me first note that while the “May-to-December Romance” is a well established type, I can’t think of another example of an epic life-spanning May-to-December maternity narrative. Nihil sub sole novum is a cliché and a falsity.
Anyway, there appears to be a tendency when writing pop film criticism to frame things in the most general way possible. If it’s a movie about a thing, it’s a movie about Thing, whether or not the movie displays much universalizable insight into Thing. Maquia is a movie about a mother, so it’s clearly about motherhood in a real sense, but I’m not sure it’s right to call it about motherhood in the broadest possible sense. Maquia is, however, a highly compelling and detailed portrait of a very specific mother, informed by Mari Okada’s thoughts about her own very specific mother.
It’s an idiosyncratic portrait because Mari Okada is a strange person who writes works of – to put it in neutral terms – “heightened drama.” For context, she spent her youth as a shut-in with her single mother due to severe social anxiety, and what she calls in her memoir very probably a panic disorder. She spent so long trapped inside her own head that her career as a screenwriter might be called an exercise in getting outside it, but even in other people’s heads, her own worldview leaves a distinct tint – and “distinct” is the right word. This is not always a good thing.
Indeed, I seem to remember there being a few truly, bracingly strange moments in the narrative which had me really wondering if a “100% Okada movie” was such a good idea, but for the life of me I can’t remember what they were. This should tell you something. The rough moments are only part of what makes the movie so interesting as an object of consideration. I think that you do have to have a certain tolerance for her way of writing (and now her way of directing), but I think that threshold is quite low. This is an accessible movie, and if you find the premise at all intriguing, you should check it out. It’s a touching and heartfelt tearjerker of a story. Okada once commented that at first she thought the reaction of wanting to call one’s mom after a movie (Tokyo Story is a common one) was distinctly Japanese, but hearing us foreigners react to Maquia proved to her otherwise very, very conclusively.
Now I know it sounds like I’m wrapping up my writeup, and I’ve probably told you everything you really need to know about this movie. Compelling concept, deeply affecting, you get the idea. But here’s the thing: this movie is also an amazing feat of raw animation power. Almost 2/3rds of this movie was animated by Toshiyuki Inoue as a favor to producer Kenji Horikawa before he retires. Toshiyuki Inoue, you may recall me having mentioned, is one of the most skilled animators to ever walk under the vault of heaven. To help him, he brought onboard many of his immensely skilled friends. This movie’s animation is amazingly complicated yet absolutely full of character. I could absolutely go into great detail about what makes it so astounding on a scene-to-scene basis, but I’ll spare you. Unlike the next movie in this article, I do not think that animation of this caliber was necessary for the production or is integral to its appeal. However, I absolutely had to mention it, because this is the current masterwork of one of animation’s greatest.
Liz & the Blue Bird
You can explain what happens in Liz & the Blue Bird in a sentence or so. It’s about two seniors in high school: Nozomi and Mizore, 1st flute and 1st oboe in their school band. They’re very close to each other, but temperamentally heterogeneous.* Neither knows where they’re going afterwards; neither wants to part from the other; neither knows what they want for themselves: so they awkwardly cling to each other in their own way. Over about 90 minutes, they learn what letting go would mean.
These aren’t simple emotions, exactly, but putting it into words undercuts the fact that this may be the most beautiful animated movie I’ve ever seen.
I don’t merely mean that it looks pretty – though it does. Rather, this beauty is the kind only possible by an absolute unity of art. Every piece is in its place: sound, color, movement, words, composition, design. It all articulates as one. This is just what constitutes film aesthetic, properly understood.
The operating principle of the movie is specificity – a kind only possible in animation due to the precise control of every textual element. The opening sequence of the movie exemplifies this, and introduces motifs associated with the girl Nozomi. There is a certain way her ponytail swings, which will recur. What recurs is not a shot, though a shot does recur; what recurs is the motion. This is one of the things Mizore likes about her. There are many of these motifs, and many of them are aural as well. The entire opening is a soundscape which is half-music and half ambience of the two girls walking through their school together silently. Taken as one, it creates on screen something like their sense experience – a kind of ground-level phenomenological study. Not a bad way to show what their relationship is like, huh?
“Specificity” is a word that some fans of western animation use to talk about old school character acting – the kind in old Disney movies, where everyone carried themselves in an immediately recognizable way. Some of them contend that anime lacks this kind of specificity, which is partially true, since Japanese approaches to character animation are fundamentally quite different. Liz has some specificity of character, but even more, Liz has a lot of animation which is hyper-specific to an emotion. This kind of realist animation isn’t unique to Liz, but it’s important to it. Animation can very cleanly show the exact and precise way in which a girl might set her flute down during a rest and clench the hem of her dress as emotion silently overcomes her during a rehearsal. Quiet moments and subtle gestures like that are key to how director Naoko Yamada tells stories.
Not unrelatedly, Yamada uses lots of shots of legs and hands during this movie, as she does in all her work. She says they’re an underutilized way of showing emotion, but they’re especially well suited to animation. The human face has countless muscles which animation can’t replicate, but legs and hands have many clear points of articulation and can show as much subtlety in how people shift their weight and posture as the animator can put there.
Reiko Yoshida’s script is probably the most conventional component, and it’s quite funny how little of what’s being said at any given point has anything to do with what’s happening in the movie. The important thing is that Yoshida is good at writing high school girls being high school girls. Some scenes feel more anime-like than others, and those scenes are usually the ones which have the most Yoshida in them. Luckily, they feel like they’re from a good anime – these girls are fun.
The voice of Ayano Takeda, the author of the Sound! Euphonium novels from which this is adapted in bits and pieces, comes through oddly less in the characters and more in the heavy use of visual metaphor. The story of Nozomi and Mizore is framed by the eponymous fictional fairy tale Liz & the Blue Bird about a lonely girl who becomes friends with a beautiful blue bird who can turn into a human, whose love for the lonely girl compels her not to fly away. The fairy tale is the basis for the third movement of a tone poem which their school band is playing in a competition. As you might imagine, there are windows and birds framed by windows and birds flying around and windowframes casting shadows and…listen, this movie has many subtle parts (including other visual metaphors), but this is not one of them.
Now, I’m not going to go on any more talking about individual parts (but I could – I could for a thousand words more), because at this point you should get why this is an astounding movie. I’m afraid, however, I haven’t told you much about why you should care beyond that yet. I’m writing to you, after all, not to my film studies professor.** The truth is, like the Sound! Euphonium TV series, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to everyone. It’s a delicately told story about two girls which I found quite moving and worthy of contemplation, but it’s a very small story where not a lot happens. You have to have a taste for small stories like that, and a lot of patience for Naoko Yamada’s “whisper once, don’t yell twice” style of filmmaking. It asks that you be very observant. Like Naoko Yamada’s A Silent Voice from 2017 – a more thematically complicated but comparatively messy film – I only fully appreciated and felt it on watching it a second time.
Anyway, I’m not disappointed that this isn’t one of the Oscar nominees: because I already know ElevenArts can’t actually run an Oscar campaign, but also because movies like this don’t benefit from that kind of exposure anyway. It is the best anime film of 2018, but a bunch of people watching it because it’s prestigious would just lead to a lot of disappointed user reviews. What I do hope is that the academic film studies people find this movie, and they write the volumes about it that it deserves.
Ah, one more thing to note though. The tone poem Liz & the Blue Bird which Akito Matsuda composed for the film is actually quite good in isolation from the movie, and the important 3rd movement especially so.
*And that’s the only thing hetero about them.
These aren’t simple emotions, exactly, but putting it into words undercuts the fact that this may be the most beautiful animated movie I’ve ever seen.
I don’t merely mean that it looks pretty – though it does. Rather, this beauty is the kind only possible by an absolute unity of art. Every piece is in its place: sound, color, movement, words, composition, design. It all articulates as one. This is just what constitutes film aesthetic, properly understood.
The operating principle of the movie is specificity – a kind only possible in animation due to the precise control of every textual element. The opening sequence of the movie exemplifies this, and introduces motifs associated with the girl Nozomi. There is a certain way her ponytail swings, which will recur. What recurs is not a shot, though a shot does recur; what recurs is the motion. This is one of the things Mizore likes about her. There are many of these motifs, and many of them are aural as well. The entire opening is a soundscape which is half-music and half ambience of the two girls walking through their school together silently. Taken as one, it creates on screen something like their sense experience – a kind of ground-level phenomenological study. Not a bad way to show what their relationship is like, huh?
“Specificity” is a word that some fans of western animation use to talk about old school character acting – the kind in old Disney movies, where everyone carried themselves in an immediately recognizable way. Some of them contend that anime lacks this kind of specificity, which is partially true, since Japanese approaches to character animation are fundamentally quite different. Liz has some specificity of character, but even more, Liz has a lot of animation which is hyper-specific to an emotion. This kind of realist animation isn’t unique to Liz, but it’s important to it. Animation can very cleanly show the exact and precise way in which a girl might set her flute down during a rest and clench the hem of her dress as emotion silently overcomes her during a rehearsal. Quiet moments and subtle gestures like that are key to how director Naoko Yamada tells stories.
Not unrelatedly, Yamada uses lots of shots of legs and hands during this movie, as she does in all her work. She says they’re an underutilized way of showing emotion, but they’re especially well suited to animation. The human face has countless muscles which animation can’t replicate, but legs and hands have many clear points of articulation and can show as much subtlety in how people shift their weight and posture as the animator can put there.
Reiko Yoshida’s script is probably the most conventional component, and it’s quite funny how little of what’s being said at any given point has anything to do with what’s happening in the movie. The important thing is that Yoshida is good at writing high school girls being high school girls. Some scenes feel more anime-like than others, and those scenes are usually the ones which have the most Yoshida in them. Luckily, they feel like they’re from a good anime – these girls are fun.
The voice of Ayano Takeda, the author of the Sound! Euphonium novels from which this is adapted in bits and pieces, comes through oddly less in the characters and more in the heavy use of visual metaphor. The story of Nozomi and Mizore is framed by the eponymous fictional fairy tale Liz & the Blue Bird about a lonely girl who becomes friends with a beautiful blue bird who can turn into a human, whose love for the lonely girl compels her not to fly away. The fairy tale is the basis for the third movement of a tone poem which their school band is playing in a competition. As you might imagine, there are windows and birds framed by windows and birds flying around and windowframes casting shadows and…listen, this movie has many subtle parts (including other visual metaphors), but this is not one of them.
Now, I’m not going to go on any more talking about individual parts (but I could – I could for a thousand words more), because at this point you should get why this is an astounding movie. I’m afraid, however, I haven’t told you much about why you should care beyond that yet. I’m writing to you, after all, not to my film studies professor.** The truth is, like the Sound! Euphonium TV series, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to everyone. It’s a delicately told story about two girls which I found quite moving and worthy of contemplation, but it’s a very small story where not a lot happens. You have to have a taste for small stories like that, and a lot of patience for Naoko Yamada’s “whisper once, don’t yell twice” style of filmmaking. It asks that you be very observant. Like Naoko Yamada’s A Silent Voice from 2017 – a more thematically complicated but comparatively messy film – I only fully appreciated and felt it on watching it a second time.
Anyway, I’m not disappointed that this isn’t one of the Oscar nominees: because I already know ElevenArts can’t actually run an Oscar campaign, but also because movies like this don’t benefit from that kind of exposure anyway. It is the best anime film of 2018, but a bunch of people watching it because it’s prestigious would just lead to a lot of disappointed user reviews. What I do hope is that the academic film studies people find this movie, and they write the volumes about it that it deserves.
Ah, one more thing to note though. The tone poem Liz & the Blue Bird which Akito Matsuda composed for the film is actually quite good in isolation from the movie, and the important 3rd movement especially so.
*And that’s the only thing hetero about them.
**If somehow you do read this, Prof. Fleeger, you should be aware that there’s totally a brief visual reference to the opening of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Also the director, writer, and most of the staff are all women.
And that’s about it for 2018. Now, here’s where I’d like to tell you all about where you can actually watch these movies, but just like last year, most of them are currently only available on BD and not for streaming. This isn’t really surprising, since of the anime I wrote about last year, only In This Corner of the World and Mary and the Witch’s Flower are available to stream in the US. You want to watch A Silent Voice? lol buy the disc for 22 dollars, or else buy yourself a gift card for the UK iTunes store and enjoy your DRMeriffic digital copy. You could strip the DRM, but then as xkcd once pointed out, you may as well just pirate the thing anyway.
Ahh, but of course, this is an article specifically about anime that had a theatrical release. Last year my point in doing this was to show how anime was here, culturally, no matter if an anime feature actually got nominated for an Oscar or not. This year I don’t really have a point, except that animation is cool. Why am I doing this again?
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