I think, though, that this is part of the show’s inherent musicality, how it can stir a range of emotions and navigate different territories with subtle shifts and deft instrumentation.
This isn’t such a bad thing, but it is an intermittently noticeable one, and it might be annoying for someone who likes a more focused narrative and tone. The art and the animation of this anime truly build up the drama and sadness in. Often we lament a show pandering too explicitly to a particular demographic, so that’s a point in the favour of Your Lie in April, but it can also make the show feel as though it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Genre(s), Romance, Music, School, Shounen. The protagonist is male but nonviolent and un-superpowered the narrative is lightly romantic and often funny, but explicitly concerned with a deep-rooted sense of trauma and psychological turmoil its aesthetic is pretty and painterly but belies a darker interior. Because the show operates in this way, it’s difficult to pin down, both in terms of its genre and who might get the most from it. This idea is reflected everywhere in how the show embraces the extremes of emotion and tone that is typical of one’s teenage years and emblematic of how music can stir up sentimentality, melancholy, or optimism. Between him and Kaori, another classical musician, Your Lie in April has a relationship bonded and in some sense defined by the transporting beauty and power of music. The spectre of both loss and trauma loom over Kosei, a piano prodigy who hasn’t played since the death of his abusive mother two years prior. The themes being unpacked here are of the high-school variety, but Kosei, Tsubaki, and Watari, some of the first characters we meet, have bigger fish to fry that the usual school-age matters of crushes and studying for tests and suchlike. What I want to do with this post is to further dive into these three key moments using Your Lie in April, an excellent graphic novel-turned-anime by Naoshi.