I´m not the reviewing-type of person so this will be more my thoughts on this show.
First I have to say that this series was from the visual and acoustical point brilliant. There is nothing as annoying as bad CGI ruining the mood of a scene, just because you´re so distracted that you can´t concentrate on the dialogue. Just recently I had a few shows I really liked, also from the animation point of view, but when it came to CGI they were quite a mess from time to time (like the background people from parasyte). In this case it is the opposite. The merging from 3d to 2d was amazing and I enjoyed the animation of the fingers and keyboards really much. But the animation wasn´t the only visual aspect I loved. “Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso” always knew when to be bright and colourful, or when to be more dusty and dark. It had a unique art style that may not be for everyone but I personally liked very much.
Same goes for the music.
This is a music-anime so this is an important point. When you really dislike classical music, or when you can´t stand a whole episode just watching somebody playing piano, than this is definitely not the right show for you. But If you like it or even just don´t bother than you should give it a try. Personally I´ve never been so much into classical music, but I think in combination with movies or series it is a great instrument of support. Here we get characters who try to reach the emotions of their audience through the music. Hence they literally are what they are playing, because their souls became part of the music. So if you don´t like the music you obviously won´t get emotionally attached to this.
That leads us to the characters ...that´s a hard question. I´m not so much into romance as a genre because I´m not good at watching two people who actually love each other not getting together...it nearly physically hurts me. Considering this there is not so much character development. When you get to know a character ...you really know him. There aren´t many twists or changes in them or their actions, but that is neither a flaw nor is something missing through this in my opinion, because I personally liked the characters as they were. They felt natural and that is something I don´t say very often in anime.
I haven´t mentioned the plot yet, but there is not so much to mention without major spoilers...so we get our bunch of high school kids, who are really close friends, but with different goals for the future and our protagonist is a pianist, who quit playing a while ago...so guess what will happen....But that was also not a flaw in my opinion because in this anime the how counts much more than the what.
All in all this was absolutely beautiful. It gave me chills from the first to the last second and is absolutely worth a try (if you don´t have a problem with romance, drama and classical music).
