Reviews

The music genre hasn't been very rewarding in the recent years. Moeblobs playing instruments within school club and some melodrama series aimed for teenage boys. It's been nearly 6 years since Sakamichi no Apollon came out, and over a decade from the peak of music series when we were lucky to get ridiculously high quality series such as Nana, Beck and even Nodame Cantabile -- not to leave the comedy masterpiece, Detroit Metal City unmentioned. Now, Piano no Mori has landed, and based to the first 6 episodes, we are as close to these mentioned series in terms of quality as we can realistically expect.

The Perfect World of Kai (aka Piano Forest) follows two youngsters whose life and past are pretty much the opposites, but they still share somewhat similar personalities and similar love for piano. They are friends, not foes. The driving motion of the show is chasing after the dream of being a professional piano player. The approach to this is very light-heart and slice of life. At this point, it looks like the series mainly aims to capture the life of its main characters with its ups and downs. Character development, good and bad moments, creating realistic life story similar to other career-focusing series such as Uchuu Kyoudai and Glass Mask.

The drama is giving me vibes from series such as 3-Gatsu no Lion (e.g. compare Sousuke Ajino to Kai Shimada), as well as from Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu. The young age of our main characters may make this comparison seem rather weird, but I am mainly referring to the side character adults whose legacy our kids are following. Lines such as "the abandoned piano is as broken as I am" is a sentence similar to what we hear in both of the examples. The comedy on the other hand lies within the shared good moments in the slice of life setup.

So far, the biggest problem with this series are the piano playing scenes which are CGI. Our mc's movements seem to be the combination of waddling and clock's pendulum. It's so hideous I often find myself in gringe. I can forgive most of this, but not unsee. The seiyuu work is really favoring the seinen demographics and the music in the series is pleasing myself as a guy who hates the emotional sad piano shite which every drama series seems to love these days. This one has better piano songs, and the OP and ED are just glorious, not only to listen to but to look at.

This series has surprised me big time. Originally I didn't even plan on watching it because the movie was already dragging and too long. I expected this TV adaptation to be more the same but even worse paced, only capturing a fraction of the manga story. After the series' production was re-planned and they announced midway thru 1st cour that this would be 24 episodes instead the original 12, I got interested enough to try it and am currently more impressed than disappointed.