Your lie in April

Episode 7

Everyone deals with losing a little differently, but no one likes it. Just a week after Tsubaki's last softball game of the year, we see Watari lose his final soccer match. He tries to be a good sport to his teammates and flirt with the girls, but he's clearly dejected. Kaori talks to Kosei about how athletes aren't that different from musicians, and it sets this week up for an exploration of dealing with past failures. At first I thought that this episode would be as focused on Watari as last week was on Tsubaki, but Your Lie in April is always full of surprises. By "surprises," I mean that we're back into Kosei's usual competition grind, where we meet the two surprisingly familiar faces of his old rivals.

This is a highly distinctive chapter of Your Lie in April due to the inventive "camera-work." The direction tells its own story, going even further than previous episodes have in that department. It's not just Kosei's flashbacks and psychological scenes where he cowers in a chair, Shinji-style. There are also match cuts from Kosei to Emi Igawa, one of his new piano rivals, when she explains her competition history with him, suggesting unexplored commonalities between them (that he apparently doesn't share with Takeshi Aiza, his spiky-haired male rival.) Then we have all the Dutch angles when Kosei is freaking out right before his performance. Anime loves weird angles, and Your Lie in April is no different, but it's very deliberate here. Kosei's world tips very slowly off-kilter as he loses it. It gradually disorients you to match your mood to his. I found it quite clever.

Even Kosei's mind trips feel fresher this week. We've only seen that black cat once or twice before, but it shows up extensively here, and now we finally get the backstory: Kosei had his own black cat as a kid, named "Chelsea," that his fanatical mother took away when it bit his hand. She was so obsessed with her son's piano prowess that she'd abandon a poor innocent kitty for getting in the way of it. It tells us more about Kosei and his mother's relationship, and the cat keeps showing up in his mind-world to speak to his subconscious. It's the part of his past that weighs on him the most—which is why he loves kitties, but breaks down in guilt whenever he meets one.

Most of this episode was about Kosei coming to terms with the past, when the piano competition brings him face-to-face with his former competitors. With Kosei out of the way for the past few years, they've become the new piano superstars of their age group. (Takeshi has even won the competition he's now reentering!) Still, that doesn't take away their old resentment or fear of Kosei. Even as they prepare for future competitions, all of these characters are living in the past. Kaori provides a breath of fresh air precisely because she's able to bounce back up from her failures, and is always looking forward to the future.

Takeshi and Emi have shown up previously in the OP, and I always wondered if they were going to become actual characters or if they were just "generic attractive kids playing piano." (Of course, whether Takeshi's hair is "attractive" is for you to decide.) Now we know who they are, and have learned a little bit about their history and what Kosei's child prodigy career looked like from the outside. It's interesting that so much resentment is based on Kosei "playing exactly what is on the page perfectly." When I was a teenager playing music competitions, I was always told that should be everyone's goal. Classical music, compared to other music genres, is low on interpretation and improvisation. Your Lie in April is a story that believes in making music your own, no matter what kind it is. By extension, it means finding your own value in your art, and figuring out for yourself what it means to your life.

It could be said that the anime itself is doing this to the manga source material, which certainly didn't have the direction and color palette that animation brings to the table. The presentation of these episodes—this one, especially—certainly triumphs over claims that it's just this season's iteration of Nodame Cantabile. Like its characters playing Chōpin etudes, Your Lie in April is working with well-worn, classic material. However, what it does with that is different, and that's what keeps proving its mettle week after week. Hopefully, it can keep up the originality for the full 22-episode run.

Rating: A-

Your Lie in April is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a graduate student in musicology, who has written about anime and many other topics for LGBT site Autostraddle.com and her own blog. She tweets at @composerose.