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In a world where every teenager is a philosopher. Where every decision is backed up by a few minutes of brooding monologue, as the extremely obvious is explained repeatedly exists a show that is deeply flawed simply due to it's own genre trappings.
Your Lie In April is that show. In this review I will probably be harsher than perhaps I should be, however, watching all twenty two episodes elicited a very interesting reaction from me. One of frustration, exasperation, lost potential, and maybe just a little bit of hope.
A show that could've done so much right. A show that is dragged down by shallow themes, weak romance, appalling humor, limp characterization, and most importantly, a fetish for trying to make you cry. A fetish that gets extremely tedious to sit through.
In this review I aim to explain my dislike of many of these elements, however, I also want to touch on the hidden potential that occasionally shines through the cloying husk of this empty, repetitive show.
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[MUSIC]
So this show is about music. Specifically piano, however, it touches on just the broad strokes of the idea of music. The vague notion of what music can do to a person. The expression in music. This is actually kind of cool. One, because there is a sorry lack of shows that are about music. Two, because I love music!
Unfortunately, these themes are explained. Yes. Quite often. However, the show rarely ever demonstrates what it explains. The raw emotion of the piano is so powerful. Nonetheless, the show tries its hardest to bury one of the prettiest instruments under a blanket of monologuing and exposition.
While this is pretty common for Shounen anime, it was particularly frustrating in Your Lie. The whole point of music is that it doesn't need to be explained. Why the hell would they keep trying to explain it? This is where there simply needed to be liberties taken in adapting this show from the Manga. You can't hear music from a comic strip, so it makes sense to have characters listening discuss the impact it is having on them.
However, why would they include this into the show? What benefit does explaining something you can hear have? None. It takes one of the shows biggest and most repetitive themes of expression through music, specifically "reaching" someone through song, and spits in its face. Especially when there are constant cuts away from the actual music to flashbacks or characters you simply don't care about, like contest judges, monologuing about how "oh man, this dude is good at the piano cause he is using emotion to play!" Man, I wish I could hear this emotion! I wish there wasn't just snippets of this emotion they keep talking about!
...
With that being said, though, the big scenes involving piano and violin are absolutely jaw-dropping to look at. A-1 pictures, a studio I really didn't know had it in them, really went all out with little details. Fingers strumming the keys, the way a pianist flicks his wrists. It's all meticulously done. Of course there are bouts of time-saving still images that permeate through the shows middle half. Unfortunately, for as solid as the art is overall, these budget-saving and time-saving aspects are understandable, but i'd be lying if I said they didn't effect my overall enjoyment of the show.
These huge musical extravaganza's rarely get to breath, as I said, constantly being interspersed with monologues and exposition. This, however, has a nice turn with the final episode where that breathing room is finally given. It makes for a somewhat worth it wait, although I have to ask myself If I would have enjoyed the show more if every scene like this was made to express, rather than to explain.
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The music itself is great, too. The pieces picked are all very beautiful. I found myself looking up the composition after it was played just to experience it outside of the show. They nailed the sound here.
While the opening was generally just OK, the closing tracks were gorgeous. Especially the one in the second half of the show. In fact, it's so pretty, that it almost feels as though it doesn't belong in a show that wears it's melodrama on its sleeve.
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[ART]
So the character designs are generally pretty good too. The art, as I've said, is almost always pretty to look at. The characters are all fairly memorable (in design), and flaunt unique traits... such as lips. Which is pretty interesting for an anime. This stylistic choice actually really grew on me and I found myself really enjoying how expressive this simple addition could make a character.
The art design isn't perfect, though. I found there being a huge dissonance between the characters at the forefront of the story and the same characters as seen in flashbacks. A simple two year flashback would revert these characters into blabbering children that looked like they were around six or seven, while the present had them at the "mature" age of fourteen, where they looked more like they were around twenty. That, unfortunately, I never got used to.
Every girl in the show wears hilariously short skirts. It's a weird thing to notice but I just couldn't help but laugh at this shows need to market these characters. There's something so weird about a character that looks distinctly mature, however, is just a fourteen year old girl with an incredibly short skirt. It's ridiculous to even imagine this kind of shit being applicable in the real world. It's like a bunch of older girls doing sexy cosplays of schoolgirls, rather than actual schoolgirls. It wasn't the smartest choice by the design team.
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For it's music, the animators use extremely pretty CG to animate the fingers and the piano. On occasion there were a few textures that didn't blend too well with the cell-shaded characters, however, for the most part, the pianos and the hands playing them looked spectacular. I wish there was a bit more creativity put into the shot composition of these scenes, though, as I felt like I saw the same exact swooping shot of Arima's fingers strumming the keys multiple times.
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[STORY, CHARACTER, AND THEMES]
So inevitably I have to touch on what truly bothered me about this show. Because the sound and music are generally spectacular. The characters, the story, and the thematic elements were all fairly weak in Your Lie. In fact, they were straight up lazy.
A few unique elements into the generic "love triangle" were injected with the fact that the show really didn't have any villains. It was kind of refreshing to see the competition against Arima, our protagonist, were all well-meaning people who respected him greatly. Seeing this support each other was awesome and it makes me wish that the show really didn't have romance in it at all.
But it does. Oh boy does this show have romance. In fact, I'd say the amount of romance dwarfs any musical elements this show shows off. Just about every scene was plagued in melodrama. Just... plagued. I always disliked melodrama because it felt like something injected into a story just to stir conflict, rather than create progress.
The amount of melodrama in Your Lie is simply exhausting. Every scene played out so similarly, with such a low variety of topics, that I felt like I watched the same episode three or four times on occasion. That's really bad for a show that only runs twenty two episodes.
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"Uh Oh, blonde girl lost her pencil! Watch as she looks at her hands and we get a PoV shot of her crying!" There is literally nothing more frustrating than seeing a show try, and fail, to make you feel sad about shit. Instead of developing characters, as in, making them like-able to begin with. Your Lie makes the bold move of just giving us emotional conflict right off the bat.
We hardly know these characters and they're already crying. This doesn't make me feel attached to them. In fact, I just found myself annoyed most of the time. No, I don't fucking care that Pixie Dream Girl is having health problems because I DON'T KNOW HER. Every piece of information about her is fed so ham-handedly that I never felt like I could connect myself with the heroine of the story.
She plays generic Pixie Dream Girl. If you don't know what that is, it's a character archetype that pretty much enters our protagonists life seemingly out of nowhere and inhabits this playful, cheery persona that sweeps them off their feet and has the protagonist do things he usually wouldn't do. These characters also often have sad backgrounds. This is the definition of Kaori, the blonde girl who does stuff and plays the violin... once or twice, I guess.
And so the story begins of kids caring too much about shit I couldn't care less about. I suppose that's the problem with the genre. Maybe i'm just really not into melodrama. I personally didn't know that the show was going to be literally 90% melodrama.
Especially since Kaori is less of a character and more of a tool for Arima to develop. However, this tool is so mediocrely portrayed and boring that I found myself with a mild disdain for her throughout the entire series. Which is sad since Your Lie has proven that it can write interesting characters with Arima's mom, Saki, who is this sympathetic character that has done horrendous things. It's hard to write a character like that and the show does so extremely well.
It's just sad that that's where it ends. The show really is just filled with the most generic possible characters apart from that.
We have...
---> Oblivious love interest number 2.
---> Sports guy
---> That friend who gives advice and is quirky
---> Younger girl that likes protagonist
---> Rivals who secretly know that they are worse than the protagonist
---> Other characters i'm forgetting.
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The themes aren't handled much better, either. For example : "Maybe the light can reach the bottom of a dark ocean," is not only a quote, but also a prominent theme throughout most of the show. Arima being pretty much Shinji from Evangelion, but less interesting. So much so that we get direct homages to Shinji's hand. We see Arima's teenage angst being portrayed as though he is at the bottom of the ocean. It's dark, wet, and without sound.
That's a fine theme to touch on. Maybe even build a deeper story within. However, ironically, this theme about a deep ocean is incredibly shallow and surface-level. Yet it gets explained so often, and so bluntly, that I found myself rolling my eyes constantly at the screen.
This can be said about everything in this series. Everything is explained. Nothing gets to breath or marinate in your mind. If a motif is teased, get ready for it to be explained directly to your face. It gets so tiresome to hear the same thing being said in a slightly different way five times, only to move on to an equally shallow and obvious theme that is done the same exact way.
Wow, I never have heard love being compared to the seasons. Wow. What a creative and original idea. Maybe if they... nope, they're just gonna go ahead and say love is like the seasons forty seven times so you get that the weather around the characters is supposed to resemble their budding love.
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So we have this Catcher in the Rye-esq edge to the protagonist that gets humdrum by episode four, but what truly is offensive is the fact that all of this edge is delivered like a punch to the mouth. With extensive monologues. I'm talking pages and pages of characters speaking into thin air. Dreary and endless doesn't even begin to cover how obnoxious this was.
Especially since hearing these fourteen year olds wax poetically about love is something that may have been interesting to me when I was fourteen, but now that I've grown up and realized that a crush on a girl in highschool isn't love. And most definitely doesn't deserve this much attention. It's not even a friendship that develops, I never get the idea that these characters are friends first, romantic interests second. It's all just romance in the most hackneyed possible way.
Even if these characters are just actually supposed to be edgy teenagers, it doesn't really do the show any favors by not making a comment about that concept. No, I don't find a kid being edgy interesting. It's more of a joke. Ironically, a funnier joke than anything this show can muster up. Have I mentioned how unpleasantly unfunny this show is? It's anime reaction humor that is so misplaced and awkward that it wasn't just unfunny, it was cringe-inducing at times.
Kids don't talk like this. Kids don't act like this. I don't care that he's a piano prodigy. The show never makes me care that he is a piano prodigy because the piano takes a sideline to more melodrama. A love triangle that spins its wheels until an axle breaks and it finally hits a lamp post and dies. Finally.
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If this isn't annoying enough, the protagonist is literally the center of the galaxy in this show. Every scene that doesn't include him is about him. Every scene that he's in, is about him. I get that he's the protagonist, but by making every character live off him makes the entire world feel unnatural and artificial. Two girls walk down the street. What do they talk about? I'll give you one guess.
These characters have no discernible lives apart from talking about the main character. It makes sense for someone like Tsubaki to go on and on about Arima because she gets the glorious roll of the most retarded, unaware girl in the show. But the real kicker is that she doesn't even get a resolution. She's just another girl fawning over the protagonist.
I get that these kinds of shows are marketed towards teenage boys. Usually lonely teenage boys. And by including cute girls that secretly love them it gives these lonely teenage boys the ability to insert themselves into the position of the main character and pretend like they have cute anime girls wanting to suck their cock. I also get that Arima, unlike a lot of anime protagonists, is actually very talented at the piano. But it doesn't make the fact that literally every important girl character in the show is literally in love with him.
I say "literally" in love, because this show is so self-absorbed and unaware of it's ridiculousness that when a fourteen year old says "I love you," you are supposed to actually take it seriously. As if he found his soul mate. It's a joke.
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[CONCLUSION]
Is it clear yet that I have quite a few gripes with this show? If it weren't for the outstanding production and sound this show's grade would be fairly abysmal. It genuinely couldn't ring a single emotion out of me. That is not good for a show that's entire purpose was to ring emotion out of you. It's as if it's trying to milk a cow and it's not satisfied until ever last drop is squeezed out.
The main character, piano prodigy Arima, is pretty much friend zoned throughout the entire show. Except he's an anime protagonist so it turns out every important girl "loves" him.
The ridiculous themes, while extremely pretty in execution are incredibly empty. There is no substance to them so the show needs to repeat the same thing over and over again just to fill its run-time. I wouldn't call the show slow paced because I think that the pacing is all over the place. One episode is just a monologue stating something that a four year old could figure out, another episode has fifteen plot points it needs to resolve.
There's this weird dialogue-driven structure where a character just repeats a phrase throughout an entire episode. It's really corny and sometimes kind of unintentionally hilarious. Talking about hilarious, this show is the opposite of that. It's so unfunny that I actually felt kind of depressed after every joke it forced down your throat.
It had a few unique elements in it's genre archetype, as the general lack of villains and excess of competitors gave it a very unique and somewhat interesting vibe when it came to the actual concerts. However, these concerts really don't play a huge roll in anything but furthering melodrama. As I said, the expression through music is almost always dampened by rampant cutting into loud, obvious, and repetitive dialogue. Thankfully the show at least let the final, astounding bravado performance breath and it was spectacular to look at, even if I never really found myself attached to any of the characters.
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I never really enjoyed melodrama. I think if I knew this show would have so much of it I would have stayed far away from it. It's not necessarily a bad show, in fact, my grade goes to show that it is but a woefully mediocre one. Which is sad because of how astounding some of the artistic elements are. That's where the topic of potential is ignited.
This show left me frustrated because it could've been so much more interesting if it axed every single romance element and became a show about a kid overcoming his own issues through music. Instead, it became a show about a kid overcoming his own issues through a girl telling him about music. Letting him explore a kind of expression in music he wasn't familiar with. Which sounds interesting in theory, but the amount of exposition through obvious themes ruined any potential for an interesting romance.
Romance isn't inherently bad. However, the characters in said romance need to likable. Arima is simply a perfect human being that was stricken with understandable stress. If he didn't go through what he did he'd be this nice, handsome, great guy with awesome friends and a happy life. This lack of actual flaws to the character apart from maybe being shy on occasion remove any actual relate-ability to him. I can't relate to his reaction to anything because the reaction is so cloying rather than raw.
Your Lie is deeply flawed through its own genre trappings. It takes itself so seriously that you may find yourself grasping for air. There is no levity. No wit. No brevity. It's just this slow crawl to the finish line. It's a very pretty crawl filled with great animation on occasion, pretty characters and strong voice work. But it's not a crawl i'd recommend. Especially if you dislike melodrama.
As I said, it's art and sound elevate a lacking product. The characters, story, and themes were weak and often too simple to explain potentially complicated situations. The music is beautiful but I can't say that's enough reason to watch something. A mediocre product, not because of it's lack of trying, but due to it's completely inconsistent nature.
If you want to see expressionism through music, watch Whiplash. If you want to see a bunch of broody kids monologue and cry fourteen times per episode, watch Your Lie in April.
