Yamada has a very keen eye for depicting adolescent malaise in visually evocative terms, and Liz and the Blue Bird could have benefited from even more flights of fancy than she allows for here.

The sequences illustrating the fairy tale are rendered in a handsome water color style, but even these scenes feel too slow and deliberate to enliven the film.

What's most impressive is that Yamada gives delicate life to a wafer-thin story of two friends drifting apart. Without ever feeling choppy or over edited, the shots are composed in microscopic detail.

Yamada equates the love between these two young women to a concert, impossible to perform unless there's communication and the two musicians fall perfectly in step with each other.