It's Oumae’s first day at her new high school, and as she arrives on campus she immediately cuts through the bustling club recruitment fair to find the concert band. She finds them on the stairs, getting ready to perform for all the new students. The moment she hears their first note, we hear her internal thoughts, flatly stated: “ugh, they suck”. This line gives us a clear insight into the experience that becomes Sound! Euphonium. The band thus far has been a place for students to socialize and relax after school under the pretense of band practice, which is a highly accurate description of high school club life, as anyone who ever went to high school can attest to.
In the very first scene of the show we see the girl and the rest of her middle school concert band as they fail to progress to Nationals, and all she can think is “but we never really thought we could make it, right?” Setting a goal, particularly one that high, is perfect for motivating people to practice and grow as musicians, but as teenagers there's always a voice lulling them away from their practice, calling it a waste, rejecting the notion that they could actually succeed in such a competitive environment. But that attitude would never survive in a musician, and so we see it slowly weed out the half-hearted band members one by one, for one reason or another. They'll have a fun high school experience, but this isn’t their story.
I love the work that went into making the high schoolers so familiar and down-to-earth. When they talk they talk like actual high school students. In many scenes the girls start holding hands while just speaking normally, and the camera doesn’t even bother paying it any attention. Seeing jokes flow through conversation and rebutted without any stress or overblow reaction is infinitely funnier than pushing high school students to do the kind of absurd pantomime we see from comedians on TV; it's something we can actually expect from human beings going about daily life. For Oumae and her interactions in particular this flow is comfortable. She and her friends makes jokes about being madly in love with one another, use superfluous words and slang just to fill the space, talk about the opposite sex without any romantic overtones, and all of it happens without breaking their walking pace or schedules, without breaking the flow of their daily lives.
A romance flares up and is quickly extinguished, but it never rises above discussion for the other characters, and so the camera too doesn’t give it any special treatment. Characters quit the band for tangible, necessary reasons such as logistics or cram school or pure exhaustion, but while we can sympathize with them, we can’t linger on them for too long; as far as the band is concerned they are now obsolete. They lead the rest of their happy lives right outside our view, outside the band, outside our characters’ lives.
The ones who continue find themselves stressed when they hit the wall with their practice unable to be overcome by sheer repetition. They go through the motions of playing the same three or four measures again and again and again at whatever speed they can muster, get frustrated without crying, stand up for their friends for useless things even when their friends are wrong, and slowly but surely build camaraderie with the other band members who share their passion for playing their part right, coming together to build what could actually be called an ensemble. Of course in a show about competitions there must be a rival school to defeat in order to win the goal, but in band that trope never quite made sense. Music is a competition with one’s self, and the exploits of the other bands are completely irrelevant to the journey a group of students take to becoming an ensemble, until they become the pressure of knowing that some group of students is always better.
To that end their teacher Mr. Taki is one of my favorite characters in the show because he represents all the rigor and pain that comes with band. He is lighthearted and funny, but he is also authoritative, almost dictatorial, and uses a farce of majority rule to make the students feel pressured into following his will by their own consciences. In that sense he is a flawed teacher, and that’s just fine. He mercilessly singles people out for their lack of practice, lack of commitment, or sometimes even their lack of skill, and the end result is both uncomfortable and effective at turning out a small group of devoted members who have what it takes to play in an ensemble. Anyone in a serious high school band program themselves either suffered under their own Mr. Taki or has been awed by a band that did.
Once again we have a show set in the city of Kyoto, a place very near and dear to me personally, and Sound! Euphonium’s bright color palate and beautiful frame composition make it feel even more vibrant, completely bathed in the piercing brightness of the sweltering summer sun or the warm glow of the city at night. The animation never rises to the forefront, with only one scene of characters admiring the scenery coming to mind. Instruments are all precisely animated down to the right positions and fingerings of the notes, character designs not straying outside the bounds of normal student figures. The music fits the fare of what a concert band should be playing for a competition. All these details are simply along for the ride, immersing us in the believable experience of this school, these people, this band.
The first and last shots of the show are parallels, bookends that signal the end of the fruitless middle school years of band and the culmination of the few high school months of band we have gotten to enjoy. Here more than ever I should be saying “but it really doesn’t matter who wins or loses because they all grew as people, friends, musicians”, and I guess they did grow in a way that is irrelevant of the results. But I desperately prayed for them to win. Even in the last moments there is the lingering anxious thought of not truly being good enough to move to Nationals, that the harsh training they endured was little more than a formative experience and a drive to work harder in the future. That thought never really goes away with time. The only thing that stamps it out is a mind that refuses to fall to that level of resignation, a determined mind backed by clear results that show their time has come. I sat in front of my screen, hearing only snippets of their final performance and absolutely none of the other bands, and I prayed and prayed and prayed.
Looking back, Euphonium tells one of the most ordinary, everyday stories of any anime I have ever watched. If someone were to ask me for the most accurate description of going to high school and joining the band possible, there would be nothing I could say that Euphonium wouldn’t, even having been through it myself. We see real people going through pressure and frustration in small and large ways, and dealing with it through whatever means of venting they actually conceivably have, not crazy drama and crying set to a score. Some overcome, some do not, but no one reaches any level of perfection in anything they do, nor are any of them without motivations for occasionally acting cruel and morally wrong.
But we also see them going about normal life and wasting time with friends in real and relaxing ways, not by joking about their cup sizes or holding curry making competitions, but by chatting about nothing by a riverbank and falling asleep while riding the train. Slice of life generally contains antics that go beyond the bounds of how normal friends behave, or dialogue that calls attention to each and every detail and joke being said as if they were precious jewels, and here every line is left to flow into the next, unimportant as it may have been alone. It's so realistic, so mundane, so accurate as to the stresses of band coupled with the relaxation of passing time doing absolutely nothing, that there is really nothing to do but fall in love with every passing second.