In one of the first shots of Your Lie In April, we look down from a brightly lit ceiling and see a young boy in a bright blue suit, playing a fast and torrential piece by Beethoven on a shiny black piano, with the red felt of the brown hammers striking on every note of the white keys. The show’s pastel palate immediately conveys a sense of warmth and vibrancy, and the piece brings a sense of energy and power. In the next shot, we are looking up at the boy from the keyboard, and all we see is a washed-out bright blue suit, pitch white lights, and a sullen face shrouded in shadows. The melody repeats with perfect precision and suddenly the cascading notes seem mechanical, precise, almost unmusical. This is how we meet the traumatized Kousei, the young musical genius who will soon stop playing the piano as the notes he plays abruptly cease to reach his own ears. It will be some time before he hits another key.
Thankfully he runs into a violinist named Kawori by accident in a park and falls for her at first sight. As soon as she appears we know that it is her job to save him from a lifetime of trauma, and it is his job to fully climb over the wall of his trauma in the span of a few months to prove to us that she is really the most perfect thing that ever happened to him. While this may seem like too much responsibility on both of their parts, they're aided by language far too cheesy and dramatic for actual middle schoolers, a limitless supply of tears, and their instruments, which allow them to express an infinite range of sentences and emotions while still following the notes in their scores. For the first few episodes, he has to relearn how to play the piano. After the first few episodes, she will never play the violin on screen again.
They meet via a female friend of Kousei, who promises to introduce Kawori to a male friend of Kousei’s who Kawori has a crush on. It happens in April, which is also when one of these four—particularly the most important one—has to have told a lie for the title to work. Given that I left the names of the other two out, you can probably guess as to their overall importance in the show. Ironically, as a result of the meeting Kousei is given the name “Friend A” by Kawori, which is exactly how I want to describe Kawori’s crush. He is underdeveloped and unnecessary to the show in every sense. Kousei’s female friend plays a single role towards the end, and by virtue of being his female friend you may've even figured that role out by now. There are plenty of tears and sappy lines to go around.
And in a sense there’s plenty of music, as there should be in a music show; yet I find music to be an arbitrary choice of a “goal” to chase for Kousei, as well as a less-than-subtle way of forcing emotion onto the viewers. Not that the music is bad. Quite to the contrary, as a classical piano-centric show, every song that came on the screen sent chills down my spine, without even looking at the screen. As such I find the excessive use of visual effects such as sparkling and rippling water to be unnecessary imagery for the music, which should be able to convey the same emotions to us that it does to the audiences within the show. Giving us visual explanations of the rapid dynamic and tempo changes is either an insult to our intelligence or a lack of confidence in the soundtrack itself.
The palate undergoes rapid changes between monotone gray shades and vibrant watercolors, which get the whole “trauma” point across pretty directly. While these visuals are appropriate and expressive, they are too overplayed, again assuming that we cannot experience the rapidly changing worlds of Kousei and Kawori for ourselves without the use of unrealistic visuals. The visual effects presumably exist for a symbolic purpose, and having the image of Kousei playing in murky water serves to illustrate his inability to hear the music as he plays, but frankly I find that water has little to no symbolic relevance to the story itself, nor do the recurring black cat and use of competitions as a staging for Kousei’s incremental discovery of the path ahead of him. At best they symbolize symbolism itself, or maybe plot points that we may have forgotten in the process of watching the show.
There is an inevitable build towards a climax, one that takes a meandering route of filling Kousei’s life with goals and characters to shape his music and his future. Your Lie in April does a fairly good job of sending him out into the world of music, to mature into a seasoned professional rather than an inconsistent prodigy. Some side plots are resolved, and some are left open with a promise that he will have to resolve them at some point in his future. All of the side characters we meet share a passion for music, and more importantly they share a drive to work hard, which I would consider the lynchpin of making it in the music world. We get few actual scenes of Kousei spending endless hours practicing and practicing like we get from everyone else, and frankly the cutthroat world of music is only really understandable when you see a character who gives their life to their instrument, who misses the cut time and time again for reasons other than stopping mid-performance or playing off the score.
These side characters are better suited for Nodame Cantabile, not for the drama that is the final episodes of Your Lie in April. Seeing the show’s finale makes you forget about music and instead makes you see the emotional climaxes as a score, with a mark indicating every time it wants you to cry. Just like Kousei and Kawori, I found myself veering off that score plenty.