Everything Shigatsu does explodes with a kind of strange and euphoric energy that really, really does "fills your world with colors, " demonstrating firsthand the uplifting power of a heartfelt melody. This show positively brims with joyful energy, a love letter to classical music and to the wondrous journey of self-discovery that everyone has gone through once in their lives.
The characters are all well-written and believable, with their own motivations, emotions, and backstories that make them feel as human as can be. They will trip and fall, will fumble and struggle, but the one thing you can always count on is their continued growth, development, and perseverance. By-the-book great character writing, not much more to say.
Now that all of that's out of the way, let's talk about everything that's wrong with this show.
1. The "comic relief" segments are extremely unfunny and often downright cringy. It doesn't help that these fuckers are everywhere - one every 2 or 3 minutes or so in certain episodes. They are extremely out-of-place and completely destroy the serious and delicate tones of a lot of scenes. This anime suffers from the same disease that plagues Hellsing and Drifters, in which the comedy is not just annoying but downright disruptive to the experience as a whole.
2. It's overly melodramatic, angsty, and downright cheesy at times. The usual pattern goes like this: melodrama -> piano performance -> angst -> piano performance -> melodrama -> piano performance -> angst -> etc etc ad infinitum. This show needs to know when to fucking stop repeating itself like a broken record. I swear, the dialogue becomes an absolute clusterfuck during the piano performances, which I'll get to later.
3. It comes off as a huge tryhard. Everything it does, from its animation, to its soundtrack, to its characters, its melodrama, its dialogue, while they're all very energetic and insightful, somewhere down the line they just feel very forced and pretentious. The show has a habit of oversaturating each scene with as many lines of dialogue, as many background tracks, and as many visual details as it can.
4. The characters need to shut the fuck up during piano performances. This must have been a manga to anime thing that didn't transition over very well. While it is understandable to have lots of dialogue during these scenes in the manga - where there is no sound and the only way to express music is to relentlessly describe it - this problem does not exist in the anime, and the dialogue should not be this excessive, and should let the audience "feel" the music, rather than tell them what they "should" feel, as is too often the case during these scenes.
Animation:
The amount of time and effort put into this show's animation is mind-boggling. To animate certain piano sequences, the director must have recorded a live performance of a real pianist, then pored through each and every fucking frame of video as he draws each and every frame of animation. Every kind of technology at the industry's disposal has been utilized, ranging from motion capture to 3D CG to pure traditional sakuga. This show's color palette makes you feel as if you've never truly seen what "colors" were before. Aside from maybe No Game No Life, I don't think I've seen another show with as vibrant and dynamic a palette and art design as Shigatsu. Everything about the animation oozes with a passionate love for music that cannot be fully described in words.
Sound:
The piano performances are the life and soul of this entire work. Are they worth sitting through the heavy-handed melodrama for? Oh fuck yes.
I was completely and utterly entranced throughout each and every single piano performance. As a person with considerable experience on the piano, I was able to pick up the nuances in each sound and each note, and was truly blown away. How many musicians were brought in to perform all these pieces in such specific but nuanced ways? The best way to watch these scenes would be to close your eyes and let the wave of sounds wash over your body.
Finally, I'd like to mention that Shigatsu's rendition of the hardest piece in my repertoire, Chopin's Ballade No.1 in G Minor, made me tear up for the first time in years. Having played it so many many times, my heart and ears were starting to take the notes for granted. Shigatsu relit the bittersweet emotions I felt when I heard this song for the very first time. I read somewhere that Chopin had just been separated from a woman whom he loved before he composed this piece, and as a result the piece encapsulates the joys and sorrows of love during the first two segments, then depicts the agony of parting in the presto con fuoco segment at the very end. Very fitting.
Enjoyment:
7/10
Overall:
8/10
Watch it for the music.
