Your lie in April

Boring, easy to read, even if it looks convoluted, even though I like classical music, here I was minimally interested, all the feelings and gibberish the characters were talking could not, I mean at all, be heard or felt in it. Really, as has been said here, Nodame Cantabile is many times better – in everything. I didn't find any of the characters likeable, the story dragged on like a corpse, it had nothing going for it. A plain grey anime, even though it pretends to be colorful. What was it really about? I mostly remember praying for almost every episode to be over. Still, I finished it. It's watchable, but it's hardly average. (28/05/2015)

Your Lie in April could be an interesting show for fans of classical music and for all those who like to play or play musical instruments. It is a fresh and very interesting anime series for the rest of us about the love of life and music, the joys and worries of youth, and friendship. It has a good narrative, animation, soundtrack, and interesting characters. The first major weakness appears from about the seventh episode onwards when the plot drags on unnecessarily, and this is when I lost my concentration. It only gets worse, because the constant repetition of Kousei having a trauma starts to get boring and annoying towards the end, it is not so much about the music but more about the main male protagonist's relationships and about toying with the viewer's emotions. However, either they did not pull it off or I am as sensitive as a dead fish because the dramas of the last episodes were a bit meh. The only thing I was interested in was how it would end and how accurately some of my fellow reviewers on FilmBooster guessed the plot development. The last episode was quite good, if only because the anime's creators probably realized at the last minute that this was supposed to be an anime series about music. So we finally got a short, undisturbed musical sequence that managed to say a lot more than all the crap talk that abounded in the previous episodes. The denouement was not bad at all either, and you finally found out why it is called what it is called, though some of the more discerning viewers probably suspected this, just as they knew how the blonde would turn out. I did not suspect it, or rather, I did not believe it, so I was quite surprised, although still happy with the ending. This last episode is probably the best episode of the whole anime series, in my opinion. This anime series started very promisingly. However, my enthusiasm gradually waned. Although it has a satisfying ending, the boredom I felt at times and a certain annoyance at the wasted potential does not make up for it. So my overall experience is somewhere on the slightly better side of three stars. 6.3/10. (22/11/2014)

Your Lie in April is an extraordinary cocktail about growing up, finding life-goals, friendship, music and goodbyes. However, it is a cocktail where, along with some great ingredients, some awful ingredients have been mixed in as well, and unfortunately in almost equal proportions. What strikes one first and foremost, is the imaginative portrayal of the main hero’s inner feelings, which are linked to his very successful, gradual and believable development. Aside from the main protagonist, one can also appreciate the successful chemistry between the characters and the excellent theme song in the intro, which I probably never skipped, as well as the hilarious ending. The road to the ending, however, is paved with an excess of completely silly, would-be comedy passages with lots of screaming and caricatured faces, which are so inappropriate they ruin an otherwise well-developed scene in an instant, then there is an unnecessary anticlimactic part with the piano prodigy, and above all unbalanced screen-time for the individual characters. It is a great shame that all the attention is focused on the main character, because if Tsubaki or Watari were given more screen-time, they might have not just seemed like one-dimensional appendages to the main couple, but fully-fledged characters in their own right. So, all in all, I give it 3 stars, with a complaint that basically only a few cosmetic changes would have been enough to improve the experience. (31/01/2021)