Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso (Your Lie in April) is a touching story about the power of armchair psychology.
It starts out with some kid getting assaulted. This is comical because it’s a girl assaulting a boy. The fun never ends. Tomboy assaults Beta Male until he’s confounded by psychoses that can only be solved by armchair psychology.
Beta Male’s mother beat him until she died of exhaustion. Childhood trauma? ✓
The music community ostracized Beta Male for playing sheet music so perfectly that he lacked individuality. Perfectionism? Guilt? Inferiority complex? Finding yourself? It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to assume these terms are relevant.
Just when you think there aren’t enough pre-psych majors to go around, Shigatsu ups the ante by introducing Freud Jr. She was so skilled at psychoanalyzing Tomboy that the show found it wasteful to add a second dimension to her personality.
Freud Jr. analyzes Tomboy. Free Spirit analyzes Beta Male. Pimp with a Heart of Gold analyzes Tomboy. Tomboy analyzes Beta Male. Beta Male analyzes Free Spirit. In sum, Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso is full of characters who can armchair psychologize everyone else in the universe with surgical precision yet have no idea how they’re feeling themselves.
Final Grade: +
Yeah, the drama is stupid, but the music scenes are awesome. Wouldn’t be the first time good music justified watching an anime, and it won’t be the last.
This post came a day too late. My birthday was on the 15th. Your goof up in April, Raptor. Ah well, there’s always next year. Anyway, I really loved the show. I agree that the music scenes are incredible. I love the frantic pounding of the keys and the distortion of the sound when “Beta Male” is quite figuratively drowning in the sea of his own neurosis. That was always a powerful image to me. I largely ignored the love stuff because we all knew where it was going, although I didn’t see the ending coming until later in the game. That last concert performance was beautiful. To me, that was the payoff for all the puppy love going throughout the show. My friend and I had a discussion on how the show tried to retroactively debitchify the mother who, according to the mother’s best friend and now “Beta Male’s” mentor, gifted him the ability to perform without hearing his own music….yeah. Beating a child for every deviation from the sheet score was just her way of showing love. Him having to wear long sleeves year round to hide the welts, bruises, and scars was the only way she could guarantee he could provide for himself at the manly age of 14. He isn’t even ready for a quinceanera, and this woman is slapping him around like an idiot blacksmith apprentice in Medieval era Europe. Granted he turned into a pretty badass musician. It seems that trauma is the only way for this to happen; Nodame Cantabile being the one to which I would compare this.
Love conquers all, right?
I ignored the love stuff as well, by putting off watching all the love-heavy/music-light episodes until the series was almost over. That’s after blazing through the first 10 or so and recovering for the last 3 or 4.
But yes, the music was great. It’s a shame that the one time I’m going to Tokyo, there’s an anime event up in Nowheresville.
Well they said that the reason Beethoven went deaf was cause he was beaten when he was a kid. So there’s that.
Beta-male-thoven really went deaf because none of the armchair psychologists around him would shut up.