Your Lie in April at a Glance

Sigh.

Y’know, I think I prefer my Manic Pixie Dream Girls American – at least they don’t say dumb shit like that. At the same time, though, is this something any modern Japanese girl would ever say anyway? At the same SAME time, I’m not totally sure I’d say the girl is a MPDG since she seems a little too devious for that classification, what with her whole sweeter than candy routine for the athlete guy, and her whole outburst itself isn’t much like a MPDG, is it? It is pretty anime, though, so lets just say she’s a Genki Pixie Dream Girl.

Once in a while, I do like to have a melodramatic show in my diet, and I was genuinely hoping this would fit the bill, even as I felt, going in, that I wish the kids were even just a couple years older. I also like shows in which people are dealing with a loss at a young age, as I can relate to that having lost several people during and immediately following college. I legitimately liked the first few episodes of Anohana several years back, even if that all went sideways, and hoped Your Lie in April (or as I entitled it in the screencaps, ‘Tomino April’) would manage to handle it with more aplomb.

Well… I guess the good news is that stuff about the lead having lost his ability to hear the piano after his mother died proved to not be in the show. That would’ve been pretty silly, although I was all set to talk about what a downer it seemed that anime seems fairly incapable of centering around dealing with loss without introducing some silly supernatural element; see: Anohana, Natsuyuki Rendezvous (and that one was a josei!). So, good on that. Other than that, though… ehhhhh. Maybe this would work better if the lead’s mother had simply died, not that he had a Stockholm Syndrome-esque relationship with her and now has the same with her memory. That’s a bit much in a show that seems largely committed to bright colors and cheeriness. I also couldn’t help but roll my eyes and say, “Again?” since, damn anime parents are so rotten, aren’t they?

And let’s go back to Kaori again, because I want to mention how much it bugged me how little her actions made sense in the last minute of the episode. So, girl thinks the guy is a budding sex criminal and was just beating him senseless, but now she’s grabbing his arm and insisting he come along to her concert? Huh? That doesn’t make any sense at all, I don’t care how Genki Pixie Dream Girl she is. That wouldn’t even make sense if she was tsundere – she just met him and obviously doesn’t have the hots for him at all. Its a show of pretty poor writing if you’ve already made someone’s actions incomprehensible in the first episode alone.

Sooo I’ll give this another episode, but I don’t see it panning out for me. And, by the way? The stuff before the OP even started where they show the street with the cherryblossom trees? All I could think of was, “Oh, this is like in 5cm/second! Well, except that was prettier.”