Ranked #5300

Piano

I’m usually into slice-of-life anime, but Piano was just too real. Usually, slice-of-life anime isn’t really close to life, because if that happened, it wouldn’t be that interesting. Everything that happened in Piano had a high probability of happening in real life, so I wasn’t really interested. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I don’t think it’ll ever be one of my favorites.

One thing I noticed about Piano is that the story focused more on the lives of Miu’s family and friends. It was only in the last 4 episodes that the focus shifted to Miu. I guess it was better that way, because Miu was kind of uninteresting. Her friend Yuki was more interesting. So was her piano teacher, Shirakawa-sensei. I also love the fact that most of her family loved to drink and be merry.

I did like the voice actors for this anime. Ayako Kawasumi played the role of Miu. I don’t think it was Miu was one of her best roles, but she’s great nonetheless. Jun Fukuyama, one of my recent favorites with roles such as Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass and Kimihiro Watanuki from xxxHOLiC, was great as Takahashi.

I noticed the character designs right away, because the design is very similar to Ah! My Goddess’. That’s mostly because Kousuke Fujishima, who did the original manga of Ah! My Goddess, was the one who did the original story and character designs for Piano. All in all visuals were okay, although there wasn’t really anything special about it. Simplicity was the key feature of the visuals, and if you prefer simple over extravagant, then you’ll like Piano.

The music, as expected, consisted of a lot of classically-influenced piano music. I was really impressed when I found out that Ayako Kawasumi played the piano for the opening song. She’s certainly very talented. The ending theme, “Kokoro no Oto” by Yoko Ueno, was also very nice – I memorized it right away.

Since it was very close to real life, one good point to add about it is that it’s very easy to watch. If you want to watch something that’s not so complicated like most anime these days, or if you want to watch something that’ll relax you, then Piano is for you.
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As with all series that I watch, I try to at least watch the first two episodes, unless I really~ (and I mean REALLY~~) hated the first episode or is having trouble finding the next ones, and with this series, I completed it surprisingly. Why surprisingly?

My first impression of this series that it seemed like a series that was about classical music, the piano to be more precise, which to my knowledge the only other anime series that dealt with classical music were La Corda D'Oro and Nodame Cantabile.

As I started to watch this series, from what I noticed, the piano, much of the time played the backdrop of the series and mainly revolved more around Miyu and the ones around her. To be honest, I have no idea why I completed this series as it was really boring and seemed more like a documentary of Miyu's life than an enjoyable show. Even as a documentary that it seemed to be, I've SEEN better ones and that's sad as most documentaries bore me anyway (but I have seen awesome ones though. :P). O.o;

The only reason that I can even think up about why I finished this series would because I had really nothing better to watch at the time and I was too lazy to drop it. If I did have something better to watch, I would have most likely have dropped it.

As for the animation, character designs and such, it was alright. Unlike some other series that I've seen, the colors for the animation weren't that vivid and seemed quite bland to me. As for character designs, they were kinda plain and with Miyu herself, her hair just seemed a little wierd... I know in anime/manga/video games, characters can have gravity-defying hair, but hers just looked funny.

Nothing special stuck out in the overall sense, even though the music aspect of it was what caught my attention in the first place (as I love classical music and very few series revolve around it). I think that this series had potential to be better than 'just average,' maybe not extraordinarily good, but a series that I wouldn't forget about.

I have to say that I wasted how ever many hours it took of my life watching the whole series and is just one of those series that isn't a rememberable series that blends in, rather than sticking out from other series. Nothing too much more to say than it was quite the disappointment for me as I was hoping for more. read more