×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide
Your Lie in April


Nick Creamer

Rating: 4

Your Lie in April is the kind of show I desperately want to root for. It starts off by introducing us to Kousei, a former piano prodigy who's given up music. Though his childhood friend Tsubaki still prods him to play, he has his reasons for abandoning his gift. Back in his younger days, his piano work was driven by his sickly, abusive mother - but when she died, his motivation died too, and now he hates the piano. However, when he's corralled by Tsubaki into accompanying her and their other friend Watari on a double date, he's introduced to the carefree violinist Kaori, who seems destined to bring color to his monotone world.

Your Lie in April has its heart firmly planted on its sleeve. The big “first meeting” scene, when Kousei witnesses Kaori somehow summoning pigeons with her melodica, is full of lush, sweeping camera angles and shining eyes. Kousei's emotional problems are described in terms that could be taken as poetry or absurdity, depending on how deeply you buy into the show's self-love - “my world is monotone, just like a piano sheet.” “Take away the piano, and there's nothing left of me. Just an ugly resonance.” It's adolescent drama with a capital D, played in total earnest and amplified by every element of the show's production.

That can work! The thing about drama like this is it's either feast or famine. Either the audience truly buys into the drama on the scale it's being presented, or everything comes across as ridiculous. And in Your Lie in April's case, it's quite possible the stars are aligning. The show's absolutely gorgeous production helps - the characters are brought to life with energetic animation, the direction is emotionally purposeful, the backgrounds are rich and colorful, and the big dramatic scenes sing with aesthetic energy. The dialogue also helps - there's a solid naturalism to most of the exchanges between these characters, and all their personalities are established with reasonable grace. The show falters when it tries to be funny, but fortunately it doesn't try to be funny very often. The narrative is tired - “whimsical girl drags everyman out of his gloomy life” - but that's no real problem if the execution is solid. And so far, the execution here is pretty top notch. Your Lie in April is confident and full of self-love, and if it stays this good, that self-love may well be justified.

Your Lie in April is available streaming on Crunchyroll.


Hope Chapman

Rating: 3.5

If nothing else, Your Lie in April is lots of fun to look at. I can't really call it pretty, and I can't really call it ugly: it's just sort of weird, like a blend between a Makoto Shinkai movie and Chihayafuru, all sakura petals and starlight broken up by dirty-nosed kids with big clomping footsteps. Those are some pronounced noses! You'd think Nobuteru Yuuki was involved. (He is not.) If nothing else, it's well-made and energetic, and the style held my attention much more successfully than the story, which is...well, "familiar" is a good word. It's a lackadaisical dramedy, so let me break it down into its most basic building blocks...

Sad Piano Boy is best friends with Happy Baseball Girl, and has been since childhood. They're 14 now, but as children, Sad Piano Boy's piano-playing inspired Happy Baseball Girl to be happy, so she uses her love of baseball to encourage him to resume his piano practice, i.e. she hits him in the back of the head with a baseball and then coyly asks him why he doesn't play piano anymore. Sad Piano Boy had a nervous breakdown during a recital at age 11 and has been dodgy around the piano ever since, which makes Happy Baseball Girl a little less happy. (Hm, does she have feelings for him...?)

This is all about to change now that HBG's best friend, Wacky Violin Girl, has come to town. SPB sees her dancing and playing a melodica in the park and his heart skips a beat. He takes a picture of her without her permission, which is when the wacky part of WVG's personality kicks in, as she beats him over the head with the melodica and strangles him with another girl's recorder. (Why must we use the things we love to hurt others, Your Lie in April? To be fair, just hearing a melodica or a recorder makes me feel like my ears are being beaten or strangled, so hey.)

HBG arrives on the scene with the last friend in our group of four, Cool Soccer Boy. HBG knows that WVG and CSB have a thing for one another, so she nudges them together, unaware of the longing and inspiration now building in SPB's soul, his fingers already trembling for a return to those piano keys as he feels Wacky Violin Girl reach out and take his hand with a chirp of "I'm having a recital! You should come!"

I have seen this kind of story approximately ninety billion times, and yet I'm hopeful for the version that Your Lie in April wants to tell. It's a little slow-paced, but the journey is highly enjoyable, the jokes land solid (even if they're mostly physical comedy,) and there's potential for good character drama here. Give it a shot and see if this quirky little oddity works for you. It's like an anime made out of pop rocks!

Your Lie in April is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.


Theron Martin

Rating: 3.5 (of 5)

Review: Fourteen year old Kousei was once a top-caliber classical piano player, but his piano playing days ended with the death of his mother three years ago. He still transcribes music because he just can't let it go, something that longtime friend/neighbor Tsubaki (who may be romantically interested in him) wishes he could get over, one way or the other. Perhaps partly to that end she insists that he come along when she introduces one of her classmates to their mutual friend Watari, under the excuse that she would feel awkward being the odd girl out along with them as a couple. Kousei reluctantly acquiesces, his interest perhaps piqued slightly by claims that the other girl is into classical music, and winds up meeting the girl, Kaori, before his friends arrive. For him it's a magical encounter, the kind that can turn his dreary monochrome world colorful, as he watches her dance and play a melodica atop a playground dome. A violent misunderstanding arises when an attempt to take an innocent picture turns voyeuristic thanks to a freak gust of wind, but even though Emi is, at the moment, interested in Watari, the revelation that she is a violinist has already set the wheels of Fate and Love in motion. Too bad for the soon-to-be-marginalized Watari and Tsubaki.

Despite some artistic style points more suggestive of shojo manga origins (especially the way the girls’ mouths are drawn), Your Lie is actually based on the 2013 winner of the Kodansha Manga Award in the Shonen category. It looks to be a classic story about a young man's life being transformed by an encounter with a special girl, one who can inspire him out of his dreary world and show him a different was to approach his life and interests; in this particular case, Koari's more liberated nature suggests that she will help Tsubaki break free of the more rigid approach to music that was drilled into him by his dying mother and learn to actually enjoy music. The tone and delivery are mostly spot-on for accomplishing that task, and an array of pretty backgrounds doesn't hurt. Less successful is the first episode's occasional attempts at humor, which mostly fall flat. Still, the sincerity is there, the scenes of Kousei playing the piano at a younger age are nicely-animated, and the revelation that his mother wasn't a particularly nice or gentle person puts an unexpected twists on the formula.

Failed humor aside, the first episode does enough right to merit a mild recommendation.

Your Lie in April is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.


Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5)

We may have seen this story before, but that doesn't take away from its appeal. Your Lie in April is, essentially, the classic rom-com. It may be set in a Japanese middle school, but switch the ages of the cast to high school or college and it could be almost any romantic comedy you care to name. The story revolves around a group of friends in their third year at middle school. Tsubaki is the star of the school baseball team with a habit of smashing windows. (“Why's the school in the way of my ball?” she demands.) Her best/childhood friend and next-door neighbor is Kousei, the quiet, probably depressed semi-loner. Kousei was once a talented pianist, but a trauma when he was eleven made him quit the instrument. Now he views the world as monotone, with nothing particularly interesting in it beyond the pop songs he transcribes. The third member of the merry band is Watari, soccer ace and ladykiller in the making. Tsubaki's friend Kaori (she's in another class) has a crush on Watari and asks Tsubaki to set her up. Worried about Kousei and not really wanting to play third wheel, Tsubaki insists that Kousei come along. Kaori's also a musician, she tells him. If things get awkward, they can always talk about music, right?

As it turns out, Kaori is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of this show. She's a free-spirit who chases kittens about town and takes off her shoes and tights to play a melodica with children atop a playground structure in the hopes of summoning pigeons. One glimpse of her and Kousei is fascinated, his black-and-white world flooded with color. But Kaori's there to meet Watari – he's the one she has a crush on! Is there any hope for Kousei? And after she beat on him after misinterpreting his compulsive urge to capture her in a photo, does he still want her? (Probably. We know this story.) Ostensibly this will be the thrust of the series – Kaori slowly changing Kousei's dim view of the world and encouraging him to  live, something Tsubaki is afraid he's not doing. Of course, what they may not know is that Kousei really only played the piano in order to fulfill his mother's dream. We see that she was wheelchair-bound and clearly very ill, and his monologue tells us that she used to beat him if he didn't play up to her standards. Her death caused him to cease being able to play, but was that out of relief rather than depression? Arguably the most powerful image in the episode is his mother's empty wheelchair, the shadow showing her still sitting in it. This speaks the the hold she seems to have over Kousei, and it will be interesting to see if the show does anything with it as it goes on.

There's a definite charm to the art, with Kaori's wispy hair and childlike movements a lovely thing to behold. The pastel color scheme works well with the spring setting and is balanced out by the greys of the school scenes, forming a nice contrast. The characters all look distinct, even the extras like the kids, and the only really off note is the massive size of the pigeons. They look more duck-sized than pigeon-sized, which is startling. That aside, Your Lie in April is off to a charming, albeit pat, start and looks like it might be a real charmer.

Your Lie in April is available streaming at Crunchyroll.


discuss this in the forum (2 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history

back to The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide
Season Preview Guide homepage / archives