Your lie in April and why it absolutely did not Resonate with me

I consider myself a fairly average anime watcher. Sure, I don't watch most of the really popular genres, but I usually do like stuff that others have enjoyed and it's fairly rare for me to be so completely confused by the critical acclaim of a show. This is very much one of those cases however.

Your lie in April's premise is fairly standard- quiet, unassuming boy meets eccentric, happy-go-lucky girl who breaks the status quo and begins the story proper. Kousei, our main character is traumatized by his past and can't make himself play the piano anymore. In the process of suppressing his trauma he has suppressed the sounds of the piano itself and is thus rendered incapable of playing it in any meaningful capacity. See, the show does do a decent job at establishing these themes of mental trauma and how these came to be in the first half of the show. Our other main character, eccentric violinist Kaori is a solid contrast to Kousei's doom and gloom and the dynamic works really well as it builds towards each subsequent performance that slowly leads Kousei out of his trauma, out of his shell and into the world of music he loved so dearly. 

All of this sounds good on paper, right? On execution however, a lot has went wrong. Starting with the writing itself- a great thing about anime as a medium is how it's capable of telling so much with it's visuals, animations and direction. YLIA chucks all of those out of the window and instead decides that the best course of action for a music anime is to exclusively use monologues and internal dialogue to set it's scene... EVEN IN IT'S MUSIC SEQUENCES. There will be literal moments of physical action and intimacy that Kousei will narrate to the audience DESPITE the fact that we are seeing him do it. 

Another aspect of it is the melodrama- not always a bad thing, mind you. Seeing 14 year old junior high students being serious and talking about the deeper and more meaningful things in life in very serious tones *can* work... if written well. The issue is that all of it feels extremely heavy handed and distinctly lacking in any flow or chemistry between it's cast. 

To start of with the show's most pivotal arc- a running motif throughout the beginning of the first half is Kousei questioning why he plays the piano in the first place. We come to understand that he is a piano prodigy who went through rigorous training under his ailing mother and wanted to realize his mother's failed ambitions and want to see him succeed before she passed away. Said mother however was violent, abusive and emotionally torturing her own child. Add this to the fact that she passed away when Kousei was only 12 and it starts to make sense why the piano would be a sense of trauma and anxiety for him. In several instances, his friends and family try to talk and counsel him through these feelings of his but Kousei always seems to deflect these attempts, choosing to run away than confront his past. So how does the show go about coming to terms with issues of domestic abuse, mental trauma and the process of seeing the piano in a different light away from his mother's shadow? Well... midway through his performance in episode 13 through very extensive dialogue in his head while performing, he retroactively forgives his mother, thinks that all she did was for his own good and that because he can't change the past he will only remember his mother when she was kind to him from now on. He then starts thinking of Kaori and plays all his pieces in a more distinctly romantic light, dedicating his pieces to her instead.
Yeah.
That really happens. It's genuinely tone deaf and arguably the show's abjectly bad handling of a very serious theme. And what makes it worse is that after he talks about this with his family, they treat it like it was the best possible scenario. Later on, making Kousei's mother a sign of his strength and perseverance instead. And mind you, this is the same person who hit her kid with a stick and seriously injured him when he was 10 years old. I do not care if she was sorry later, the story does not do enough to justify portraying her in such a positive light later on. It's absolutely baffling.

I would like to draw a comparison to another show that shares a lot with YLIA. "Dance Dance Danseur" is a show about ballad and the journey of it's protagonist Junpei as he comes to terms with his passion for ballad after the untimely demise of his father made me conform to the social and gender expectations of the people around him as he chose to pursue martial arts instead, leaving his "girly" ballad past behind him. The show starts of very similarly to YLIA as boy meets girl who breaks the status quo and starts the plot off. However, instead of the more serious and dramatic bits of the former, Danseur takes a more fun approach to a lot of it's plot beats. Instead of YLIA's over the top chibi artsyle during it's attempts at humor, which was so frequent in how it decided to undercut any sort of serious tone the show was trying to establish. Danseur keeps it's tone fairly fun and natural most of the time which ends up giving it's serious and emotional beats a lot more room to breathe. 

To get to the point however, there is a very similar theming of physical and mental abuse and emotional trauma attached to the story of it's second protagonist Mori- the boy who who never attends school and even when he does interacts with no one and keeps a wall between himself and the people around him. Mori was taught to dance by his ailing grandmother who had previously failed her ambitions to become a ballad dancer fit to join the Russian troupe and had thus thrust all her hopes and aspirations on her grandson instead. 

Disregarding what he wanted to do, she tried to make him the best ballad dancer he could be, punishing him for any mistake he made even if he bled or passed out in the process, verbally abusing him in the process. The way in which however, the show deals with this is so much more deft than YLIA. In the final arc of the show, he looks back at how much pain his grandmother has inflicted on him but over the years he has internalized all that pain because the fact that his mother abandoned him at such a young age still feels like a fresh wound to him. We see him release the years of pain and dark impulses he has left festering within himself in an exceptionally evocative performance with no dialogue but the grace of the dance itself and the facial expressions guiding us through Mori's stages of grief and release. His grandmother is his past and he can never forgive her but the least he can do is confront the generations of abuse and trauma this artform has inflicted on them and perform it on his own terms and volitions for once. It's beautiful, satisfying and emotionally provocative. 

Let's talk about some of the redeeming factors of Your lie in April for a bit. The animation work and visuals in the show are excellent. The character designs are emotive and the direction work during conversations can often be really interesting. The way it uses particle effects in conjunction with it's, while not very notable, well produced classical soundscape sets the mood for it's performances very well. The side characters are generally very likeable and easy to root for. While it handles fairly cliched themes and tropes, the show tries to put some sort of personal spin on it. Sometimes it even works! One of the few things the show is atleast somewhat competent at is it's romance, but honestly? It's fairly unremarkable even then. There is a lot of teenage angst and unrequited feelings in the whole mix and nothing gets truly resolved by the end of it and I am just personally not a big fan of slow build romances done like this. 

Moving on, I touched on the aspect of how it handles it's humor before but to delve into it a bit- it sucks. None of the jokes are very funny and all they serve is to ruin natural chemistry and provide tonal whiplash to a ton of it's longer, more interesting conversations that actually start to go somewhere. Someone's mileage on how much they care for them would vary because humor is subjective but it was a sore note for me.

I would like to touch on another key aspect of this show- it's representation of music and the ways in which we find ourselves through it. A major theme of YLIA is how music saves us from ourselves. Kaori is a prime example of this as it's revealed early on that when she knew that she didn't have long to live she decided to dedicate herself to violin. Not conforming to the general styles and instead trying to create something unique and her own that would live on in everyone's heart. One of her roles in the story is to make Kousei understand how to find himself in that music. And this would be an excellent note to build on, if not for the fact that the show has exactly ONE performance where Kousei and Kaori perform together and have the chance to understand each other musically. And it happens in the first 4 episodes that is also simultaneously trying to establish characters, motivations, back stories and a general narrative so what ultimately ends up coming out of it is a messy afterthought that serves as the catalyst for the rest of the story. It's a very weak foundation that completely falls apart as the narrative goes on.


Another part of this is the role of piano, as an instrument. For a show that spends so much time on piano performances, there is very little we actually learn about it in the show itself. Let me very clear I am not asking that the show go into the technicalities of a piano or music theory because I get that the show isn't trying to be *about* piano. However, when during performances, all the judges constantly monologuing to themselves, exclusively talk about the emotions and "feel" of the piece being played instead of anything the least bit technical, it starts to feel like you could replace the piano with basically any other instrument and it would still be the same story. As a pianist myself, the way the show handles it's music is quite bizarre to me because it's only viewed through the emotive lens alone.
Music is a skill that's refined through practice, perseverance and hard work. However it's also a very creative art form with a very interesting process behind it. As I watched

YLIA I found it engaging to analyze the way Kousei played because the animation work goes out of it's way to animate each individual press of the key and the movement of his fingers across the keys. What took me out of it was of course that none of the people who were paid to judge these performances had anything interesting to say about it and neither did any of the cast when Kousei practiced or in practically any other talk regarding the piano.


Contrasting this to one of my favorite shows "Sangatsu no Lion" which also deals with a lot of similar themes as YLIA, but of note here is how it handles it's sport 'Shogi'. Shogi is just as important a part of Sangatsu as Piano is for YLIA.

Sangatsu has similarly drawn out segments where two players play a game of Shogi and there is a lot of conversations and monologuing in between these matches, however the show never shies away from showing the more technical aspect of the game either. Frequently using real world tactics and consulting from real life professional shogi players to make the matches feel as true to life as possible. And it all works without being boring is because the writer did an excellent job blending the narrative with Shogi. There is something to be learnt in this show and it immerses you in the world of Shogi with the way it makes Shogi a strand in the fabric of it's narrative about life.

I am left with little left to say as a way to close off this article. There are valid reasons to like "Your lie in April". However, what I was left with after I finished watching it was a lingering sense of disappointment as it is a lot of wasted potential poured into an expensive production that screams style over substance. Someday I would like to talk to someone who truly loved this show because I want to understand what they found in it that I didn't. I don't really write negative critiques because I think there's too much negativity out there already to add myself to the mix. Still, I am glad I was able to articulate my thoughts into this blog post. Merry Christmas folks, till next time.