This review contains spoilers.

From the onset, Your Lie in April presented itself as a complex web of many themes surrounding the central focus of young music prodigies. Your Lie in April dared to tackle a lot of big concepts from the eyes of a disenfranchised, lost pianist. It explored the rediscovery of passion. It explored the complex impact of loss and grief felt for complex people. It explored jealousy in its many forms, from romantic jealousy, to the jealousy of talent. It explored success and failure and finding oneself in spite of either. And it, of course, explored growing-up, growing together and growing apart. It makes a valiant effort in trying to explore these many, many things, but fell tragically short on fully grasping almost any of them.

In reality, Your Lie in April was shallow and predictable at best, and dull and drawn-out at worst. Episodes consistently failed to build dramatic tension, suffering from terrible pacing and sudden and jarring development. The show introduced new characters and expected the viewer to sympathise with them despite minimal development. This, only made worse when the show spends significant time focusing on said characters by detailing their own frustrations and passions, resulted in an ultimately uninteresting narrative.

The show propped up these failures with unimaginative and uninspired writing which attempted to explore the show’s plethora of themes without a hint of subtlety. Dialogue was frequently dry and repetitive, often awkwardly injecting quotes from Mozart and the Peanuts comic in bizarre attempts to cleverly characterise.

And it is perhaps the repetitiveness of the entire show that was one of its greatest flaws. With 22 episodes, the show is long, an issue only made worse by the total abuse of flashback. The show frequently used flashback to reveal more of conversations the viewer has already heard. This non-linear story telling was compelling at times, and inserted drama into conversations as past influences were brought into the present. However, Your Lie in April got overzealous and constantly rehashed old dialogue. Consequentially, it left the impression that the writers had little faith in their audience and needed to remind them of every important moment that happened whenever they possibly become relevant.

That all said, Your Lie in April did improve in its second half as the show moved away from a series of lacklustre set-ups into decent pay-offs. Side-characters introduced in the second half, while still abrupt, felt more fleshed-out and compelling as the uninteresting characters from the first half were pushed to the background.

The two following sections contain spoilers.

While it’s easy to articulate all of these problems, it can be best demonstrated by looking at a particular part of the story. Leading out of the prologue of Your Lie in April, Kousei is pushed to sign up for a piano competition. While the idea is introduced in episode six, it takes place over episode seven and the following five episodes (seven to eleven). In essence, the competition within the show has roughly the same run time as the show’s depiction of it. As such, it was brutally slow.

The first issue with this five episode arc is that it abruptly introduces two new characters to act as pseudo-rivals of Kousei; Takeshi and Emi. The show spends an episode and a half on the two, painstakingly attempting to make the viewer sympathise with their passion for piano and their complex relationship with Kousei, which is basically a blend of jealousy and admiration. It’s worth noting that like the viewer, Kousei up until this point didn’t know them either, and this does little to rectify the fact that these characters feel like additions made at the last possible moment.

The second issue is the constant, unrelenting flashbacks to Kousei’s mother. There’s nothing wrong with depicting her as an unambiguous villain, nor is there any issue with showing Kousei as having a complex relationship with the woman who abused him. This theme of Kousei trying to find his love for piano despite the actions of a mother who tried to beat it into him make for an interesting and motivating central tension for Kousei. Kousei’s passion for music becomes a tug-of-war between the two musical women in his life; the old, metronomic and abusive mother who killed his love for piano and the young, eccentric and wild Kaori who is trying to breathe new life into Kousei.

However Your Lie in April really fails to understand that it should show this, and not tell it - narrative advice that ought to have been taught at the middle school level. The viewer understands that this inner tension is going on very quickly because it is almost explicitly stated, and then the arc brings it up again and again and again. Yes, we’ve understood that not hearing the music is Kousei’s punishment, just let the audience see this struggle and then move the plot forward.

Stepping back from the concert arc, it also worth talking about Kaori and character death. Your Lie in April made no attempt to hide the fact that Kaori was going to die. On first impression it almost seemed like a poor attempt at foreshadowing. It was fairly obvious that something was (medically) wrong with Kaori from very early on, and the show essentially told the viewer she’s going to die by episode eleven, with the episode concluding with her saying “you know, I’m not always going to be around to help you” to Kousei. Personally, this sucked out a lot of the investment I had her and her relationship with Kousei.

However, as the show continued and Kaori’s story began to quite obviously mirror the story of his mother I did come to realisation that this was an intentional choice. Here, then, the show does begin to really work on this idea of the two women in his life. Just as Kousei is able to come to peace with his mother’s death (albeit in a somewhat problematic way) the show really dials up the parallel aspects of Kaori and Kousei’s mother. This, to the show’s credit, was clever.

The final few episodes of the show try to twist the expectation it had set by pulling fake-out death that was… okay? Again, my issue was that because I expected her to die I wasn’t really that surprised when it happened. From her apparent death onwards the remaining plot would’ve been obvious: Kousei will stop playing piano before something or someone finally can push through to him and make him play for this big final concert in which he plays to the memory of Kaori.

The show, then writes itself out of this hole by revealing that Kaori is actually still alive and grants her a chance overcome her illness. This chance, through sheer dramatic coincidence, occurs simultaneously with Kousei’s important performance, and the two have their final encounter as Kousei’s dreams of Kaori playing with him. I would’ve found a recovery for Kaori a total leap, so my only reaction to her death in this scene was that I was relieved that the writers didn’t attempt to keep her alive.

Before final comments, a quick note on the production of the show; it was good. The animation is well done and the use of CGI in the performances makes them feel very lively. The music throughout the show was excellent and that of the performances was especially so. It wasn’t enough to redeem the show by any stretch, but credit where credit is due.

All in all, the show felt simple, often relying on symbolism that only pretended to be more complex than it actually was. Trains often rushed past when two characters met. Could this suggest the relentless and unstopping nature of the world around these young characters trying to find their own place? Maybe, but it didn’t really feel this way to me. And characters frequently brought up the season coming and going. It felt like a weak attempt to allude to some hidden depth that just wasn’t really there.

And it’s not necessarily the fact that the show lacked such depth that was its weakness, rather the very illusion that it was deep set the viewer up for disappointment. For a somewhat comparable show about love, passion and music take Given, which manages to tell a really motivating story centred around music and finding oneself, and executes well on many of Your Lie in April’s failings.

So perhaps my issue with Your Lie in April was a cultural one. Maybe it is me; I am simply too old and too Western. Maybe I don’t get the Japanese symbolism of Spring or of April. And perhaps my expectations were too high for a show ultimately about middle-schoolers and their problems. Yet as someone who still loves shows and movies made for young people, Your Lie in April just felt flat; nothing more than a facade of complexity that disguised a plot of little substance.