Your Lie in April Review

Kosei Arima was a child piano machine, drilled by a sick mother to play every note exactly as written, and when she died he stopped being able to hear himself. Two years later Kaori Miyazono, a violinist who treats the score as a suggestion, drags him into accompanying her, and the series becomes the story of a boy relearning why anyone plays at all.

The performances are the reason it is loved. Kyohei Ishiguro's staff at A-1 Pictures animate hands, bows and faces with real attention to how playing looks, then cut away into colour and memory to show what the music means to the player. Masaru Yokoyama's score and the classical repertoire carry whole episodes, and the friends around Kosei, above all his childhood friend Tsubaki, are written with more care than the genre usually bothers with.

Critics fault the rest. The dialogue can be ornate to the point of purple, the slapstick, much of it Kaori hitting Kosei, lands badly, and the second half repeats its dramatic beats and its flashbacks while the ending is visible from a long way off. It aired in Fuji TV's noitaminA block from October 2014, and the tears it asks for are mostly earned; it is the constant asking that wears.