Cinnamon Ass

Kai Ichinose is a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who likes to play a seemingly broken piano he found in the woods near his home; Shuuhei Amamiya is the classically trained son of a famous pianist. The two strike up a friendship where Shuuhei encourages Kai to develop his raw talent after they discover that their school music teacher, Sousuke Ajino, was the previous owner of the piano. However, Kai’s developing talent brings him into rivalry with Shuuhei; as they head towards a music competition, will Shuuhei’s jealousy affect his technical prowess and will Kai learn to truly make the music he plays “his”, like he believes the piano in the forest to be?

Oh dear. What’s wrong with me? Piano no Mori should be a beautiful emotional story that tugs at my heartstrings and makes me wax lyrical about the beauty of learning music and friendly rivalry and things like that.

Most of the film, unfortunately, bored me bloody rigid. The first 70 minutes of the film took me five hours to get through! It’s not until the climactic competition sequence that the film really comes alive and becomes even remotely interesting or powerful, and even then it’s mostly just a better animated yet emotionally simpler analogue to the competition arc of Nodame Cantabile.

Technically, there isn’t really anything wrong with the film. The music is unsurprisingly lovely, and although most of the truly impressive moments of animation come from motion captured pianists from the looks of things it’s nicely nuanced and attractively drawn. I’ve just read the first chapter of the manga and the anime cleans up the ugly character designs to make them more palatable; unsurprising, really, but it makes the film look very similar to Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo in places.

Unlike TokiKake, however, Piano no Mori only manages to nail its more “fantastic” side. The scenes without music as their focus - the classroom brawls, the simple conversations about the piano between Kai and Shuuhei and so forth - don’t ring true for me. It may be because the characters are so young, but I failed to get a real picture of how their daily lives reflected on the musical aspect of the plot, something which I think should have been more important. Shuuhei’s acceptance by the rest of his class is sudden after being picked on for being a transfer student at the start; neither Kai nor Shuuhei have any other friendships or anything else outside their piano playing that really defines their characters. Compared to TokiKake or, say, Whisper of the Heart, the film lacks world-building; as a result, I didn’t really care very much about either of the protagonists.

The piano competition plays out pretty much as you’d expect; indeed, as previously mentioned we’ve seen the same thing in Nodame Cantabile already (not that I can really fault either Nodame or Piano no Mori for this!). The film manages some wonderful shots and occasional flights of fancy in this section, but aside from that Piano no Mori doesn’t make me feel glad that it was animated - I think it would have been better as live action, personally.

Of course, I generally don’t like the slothfulness of full-length anime features and have generally quite quirky taste, so you may still want to check out Piano no Mori for yourself - the dialogue’s not very hard to follow if your Japanese isn’t great, and if you’re a hardcore piano fanatic you’ll probably get a kick out of moments such as when Kai realises that he can’t play Chopin because he has no technique (we’ve ALL been there…). unfortunately for me, it just didn’t click; hopefully it will for other people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Piano no Mori. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.