Your Lie in April Review

Recently, I've been getting back into watching anime again. Peer influence played a part to be sure, but I think I've also simply grown more mature in a way, and I am curious as to how young adult media in Japan differs from that in America. I intend to review the new (and possibly old) anime I watch, to offer some analysis and reflection on how I perceive them.

I will admit I'm a little cautious about this hobby, as I'm well aware of the stereotypes and stigmas surrounding Japanese animation. That being said, I've tried recommendations from my peers recently, and some anime have pleasantly surprised me with their depth. Here's a review I wrote for my most recently completed show: "Your Lie in April".

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“Your Lie in April” is an anime adapted from the manga series by Naoshi Arakawa. Originally published in Kodansha’s shonen magazine, the series was likely written with a young male audience in mind. I was intrigued by the premise of the story, as a former hobby pianist myself, I looked forward to seeing how music would be used in the show. Beyond that though, I began watching without knowing what to expect.

Story

YLA follows a pivotal year in the life of former prodigal pianist Arima Kousei. His mother passes away two years prior to the beginning of the plot, rendering Kousei unable to hear the sound of his own piano. In his sorrow and fear, he resigns from playing the piano. The story begins on a seemingly ordinary day in high school, when Kousei is introduced to the vibrant violinist Kaori Miyazano. Through his interactions with her, Kousei begins playing the piano again. As the story develops, a budding romance between the two forms, and Kousei begins to heal from his trauma and rediscover his passion for music.

YLA is wholeheartedly a story of joy and hope, tinged with equally profound moments of bittersweet sorrow and even despair. The mix of emotions in the show can be at times overwhelming, but overall it handles them well. The plot weaves its way through its themes skillfully, taking its time to develop each idea thoroughly before moving onto the next.

Overlaying these already strong core themes is a deep commentary on music and its role in the lives of musicians and audiences alike. Kousei, Miyazano, and the various other musicians in the show symbolize different reasons that one might choose the path of a musician. The show also puts significant investment into depicting the endless hours of practice, tears, and triumphs of each character. Each performance is a powerful scene that conveys different facets of musical performance to the viewer, and these intricacies do much to enrich the plot. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed YLA’s story for the complex ideas it explores and for its humorous, yet serious and passionate tone.

Story Execution

I found the execution of the story to be more of a mixed bag. YLA explores some heavy topics, and overall, it does so pretty well. The plot’s most significant scenes, such as the piano performances, as well as Kousei and Kaori’s later interactions, are carefully crafted and shine with emotion. Yet like Kousei himself at the beginning of the story, there were times when I felt that YLA was playing an intricate melody, but with a noticeable lack of grace or personality.

The earliest and most prominent example of this can be found in the relationship between Kousei and his mother. Make no mistake, despite her physical absence, Kousei’s mother is an important character in YLA. In the beginning of the show, the viewer is constantly reminded that it was Kousei’s gray, sickly mother who turned him into the “human metronome.” Each of these reminders is accompanied by variations of the same series of flashbacks, and it is only in the middle of the series that they finally begin to develop into a plot point of their own rather than a device for illustrating Kousei’s trauma.

I also felt that the depiction of the events in the story could be a bit melodramatic at times. When Kousei first meets Kaori, the cherry blossoms are falling, birds are flying, and a single tear drops from her face. I found the scene well placed and breathtaking. But I think that “well placed” is the key here. YLA threw in similarly weighty scenes, but with too much frequency. From Kousei’s repeated slow motion monologues to the other musician’s repetition of their musical goals and accompanying flashbacks, I think YLA could have done with a few less of these often intense, yet misplaced scenes. This was all especially jarring at times because the show frequently sprinkled in moments of comedy, complete with over the top expressions and exaggerated animation. Normally, this would be an entertaining way of breaking up tension, but when it is done so frequently alongside YLA’s emotionally heavy scenes, it is ultimately detrimental to the story’s cohesiveness.

Ultimately, I think that YLA did a fine job executing its story, but with some noticeable flaws. Nevertheless, the merits of the plot itself definitely make up for it, and I felt satisfied with the story by the end.

Presentation

YLA is beautifully presented. There is a high attention to detail to the settings and characters, and overall the animation is pleasure to the eyes. But the artistic decisions dig deeper than the surface level as well. YLA uses visuals to convey the themes of the story in a compelling way. For example, its use of color matches well with Kousei’s character development. The animation also mixes in hand drawn stills to great effect, giving a nod to Arakawa’s original work and capturing the significance of important plot points. I found YLA’s use of visual symbolism effective, and its overall visual quality is top-notch to be sure.

In terms of sound, although I personally didn’t find many of the tracks particularly noteworthy, I do think it was effective in complimenting the story. An outstanding soundtrack has a life of its own, and becomes deeply tied to key points of a show. YLA had these tracks, but they came mainly in the form of the classical pieces played on stage. Each piece is given a formal introduction, and the selections in both their story relevance and musical depth. I would definitely say that the classical pieces were the standouts of the soundtrack, and although the other tracks were not as immediately stunning, in an odd way, they allow the classical pieces to shine even more.

Conclusion

YLA is a wonderful story that deals with heavy topics while maintaining a sense of humor and hope. It conducts itself with in a light-hearted manner, but can turn serious on a dime as well, and its great production values do a stellar job of bringing the world and its characters to life. It’s unfortunate that some notable flaws in the story telling muddled its effectiveness, but it is still an anime that I could see being satisfying to a wide range of audiences and moods. Whether one is looking for straightforward entertainment or a thoughtful story, YLA’s diverse moods and cathartic ending should fit the bill. It definitely gets my recommendation.

Role Play by Itoki Hana

I may not be a netflix binger, but I'll unabashedly admit that I'm a youtube addict. Whether it's for entertainment or education, I see youtube as a portal into a world of infinite creative potential. Content producers continuously astonish me with their artistic quality and innovative techniques, I'll definitely miss my youtube browsing sessions once school starts.

My favorite youtube discovery this summer is Itoki Hana's channel. She draws, animates, sings, and even embroiders in her covers and original music videos, giving them a unique authentic character that is as charming as it is potent. 

"Role Play" was the song that really drew me into the channel. The song is rather dark, opening as an unnamed character questions her place in a Role Playing Game (RPG). If you've never heard of these games, just know that they story driven games that focus on characters and world building. They are also known for their well defined classed systems (warrior, mage, thief, etc.), and the perspective that Itoki Hana takes on this mechanic is both unsettling and fascinating. 

The song depicts the creation of a class often left unexplored, at least from the player's perspective. That class is the villain. While classic RPGs often defined villains simply as "embodiments of ancient evil", Itoki Hana proposes a more human origin story revolving around lack of purpose and loneliness.

This concept is interesting on its own, but it's the connections that the song makes to the real world that are particularly powerful. Beginning at the second chorus, the song draws parallels from RPG roles to the roles we play in real life. Swords turn into to baseball bats and magic wands become artist's brushes. The main character continues to search for her purpose among these roles, but rather than find solace in them, they tear her apart.

Itoki Hana sings the final verse (starts at 4:05) with no effects applied, and only a sequence of beeps as an accompaniment. 

WHO did I want to be?

WHAT did I want to do?

I worked hard, I've shed blood and tears,

but I can't understand the meaning of them anymore.

This scene, even more than the implied suicide earlier, struck me as particularly chilling. It completes the idea of villains as lost dreamers and idealists. This feeling of working hard, yet discovering emptiness rather than fulfillment at the end is not unfamiliar to me. The accompanying cynism and hopelessness is the birthplace of villains.

In the end, the song proposes that "real life role play" is a deeply flawed system. Defining ourselves in terms of our explicit purposes and actions works for some people, but for those who have problems finding these roles, it is a lonely and ultimately personally corrupting system. 

Overall, "Role Play" is a haunting and beautiful melody. Give it a listen and see what your interpretation is. Itoki Hana provided a basic english translation to the lyrics in the video description. I touched them up a bit for phrasing and grammer below if you don't mind watching the video at a slower pace, just remember to turn the captions off first. 

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Role Play by Itoki Hana

IF you say you need a HERO,

I WILL be it.

... Oh, there is already a great hero here.

Then, WHO should I be?

If any EVIL doesn't exist,

I WILL be it.

Then when I'm defeated by the hero

I'll give him honor.

What IF I could be the person who I wanted to be,

But no one wants?

Couldn't find my place in the story,

And I got lost.

WHO and WHAT did I want to be?

In my loneliness

I forgot my dream.

IF there is no INN in this town,

I will make and open it.

Expecting, waiting for injured warriors.

IF there are no fight or arguments,

I will become the ENEMY. Then all of you can sing YOUR JUSTICE loudly.

What IF I could be the person who I wanted to be,

But no one wants?

Couldn't find my place in the story,

And I got lost.

WHO and WHAT did I want to be?

In my loneliness

I forgot my dream.

I will be any name, that you wish to call me.

I will be ANYTHING

THAT YOU WANT ME TO BE .

but, why...

WHO did I want to be?

WHAT did I want to do?

I worked hard, I've shed blood and tears,

but I can't understand the meaning of them anymore.

What IF I could be the person who I wanted to be,

But no one wants?

I forgot myself, I used to dream.

On Solitude

Solitude has always been surrounded by various connotations. At least in the US, one of its most common associations is with social isolation. Solitude is seen as the sole companion of the unfortunate, socially dysfunctional, and even mentally twisted. Another common association is with that of the creative genius. Lore surrounding artistic, scientific, and other inventive minds often pictures them alone, working for lengthy hours in their workshop of choice. I would venture that amidst all these images, one thing remains certain about solitude. It is essential to maintaining one’s mental health and spirit.

Over this summer vacation, I’ve spent significantly more time in solitude than in college. I wouldn’t attribute this to a radical change in lifestyle. I conduct my life in mostly the same way, but simply by virtue of being away from campus and classes, I spend more time alone. I’ve found that as I spend more time alone, I’m increasingly content to live life at a quieter, slower pace. Conversations with friends, though less frequent, are also less superficial, studying feels more personally fulfilling, and even playing games alone allows my imagination to roam more freely.

In society, it often seems that the importance of an event rises proportionally to the number of people involved in it. I want to make clear that I don’t find this surprising or problematic. Sharing and social engagement are essential to our development and health as human beings. But I can’t help but feel that increasingly, solitude is not recognized as an equally important state of being.

Solitude leads to deeper thinking and reflection. It allows our minds to process, debate, and interpret the myriad of events that occur throughout the day. Thus it is essential to self-discovery.  Regardless of one’s MBTI, solitude also helps make our social interactions more fulfilling and real. Consider this quote from Bell Hooks:

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

Stereotypes do exist for a reason. Solitude certainly has the potential to lead to social reclusion that can further slide down to depression. But to ignore its unique and essential benefits is an equally dangerous proposition, as one may grow out of touch with the self, or become overly dependent on other people. At the end of the day, no one wants to be lonely. And what be lonelier than rejecting one’s own company?

World Population

This is an early screenshot from a web application I'm working on that visualizes historical trends. For each country, I created four metrics that were represented by the different color lines. What appears to be a long gray border under the nation's names is actually 3 separate lines that are supposed to represent population.

According to worldometers.info, the current world population growth rate is 1.13% per year. At first it doesn't sound like much, but this is actually an insanely fast growth rate. To put it in perspective, with this growth rate the world population will double roughly every 50 years. 

If we look at the history of population growth, it's apparent that explosive population growth is a relatively young "problem". Only in the past few centuries has world population skyrocketed to the current 7.4 billion. 

In the case of my application, I put in the 1% growth rate and didn't give it any thought. It was only when I started working on the graphical elements that I realized the issue. My little "population bars" double in length every minute (I compressed each year into a second). Thus there was no easy way to graphically represent the scale of population growth. After all, give it a few minutes and even the integer data type itself gets overflowed (as seen in this current screenshot of the application.)

This reality has made me re-evaluate what I aim to express with this application. Originally I thought it would be compelling to show how historical trends repeat, to show how the world works at a macro level so that even the individual with his/her short life can fathom and be inspired by it.

But issues such as population growth remind me: Although history repeats itself, it also generates new trends all the time. Trying to predict its course is, as Tolstoy often advocated, a fool's errand.

And looming over all of this is the fact that the world will end eventually. No matter how I try to represent my little worlds, they should inevitably collapse if I am being realistic about the state of humanity on the earth. Overpopulation is just one of the ways in which this could happen. Thus my idea of depicting history has become unexpectedly depressing. I wonder if I should rename my application to "Apocalypse Simulator" instead?

Update: Redesign!

As you may have noticed, One Iris has undergone a visual overhaul recently. The tabs have been merged into a single navigation bar, and the archives have been placed into a dropdown menu from said bar. There have been various minor changes, and a color theme change as well.

I had a lot of fun (and frustration) digging into the page's source code. Blogger's built-in editor is a far cry from sublime, I have a lot more appreciation for good text editors now. I picked up a bit of HTML and CSS in my software engineering course this semester, but I'm definitely far from being a web development expert. That being said, I hope you guys like it. :)

Music: Going Home

Summer Vacation has taken on a new meaning in my college years. For years, the two and a half months represented pure, unproductive, lazy bliss. Of course, it's an even longer three and a half months in college. Yet as the vacation's duration has stretched, so too have my expectations associated with it. I've been home for two weeks now, and I feel a constant pressure to re-organize my life, create impressive personal projects, and in other ways define my professional identity.

For the first two weeks however, I've taken a break to relax, read, and relearn the piano, which I had stopped playing in college. I've also been reminiscing about older shows and games I played, perhaps longing to experience the same pure wonder and engrossment I once could achieve on a daily basis.

The most recent memory of absolute engrossment I have is from about exactly one year ago, in the summer of 2015. In that summer, I watched the anime "Shin Sekai Yori" or "From the New World" in the span of around a week. The show was highly thought provoking and I give it my highest recommendation. As I recalled my enjoyment of the show, one song kept rising to my memory. It captured the essence of the series for me: its emotional depth, contradictory nature, darkness, and stunning beauty.

The song is named "Ienikaeru" (Going Home):

This song could be described as the main theme of Shin Sekai Yori. The show opens its first scene with the piece, and evokes it in key moments of character and plot development. I won't be analyzing the piece's importance in the show, as doing so would be impossible without giving the plot away. Rather, I'll be discussing the piece from within the larger context of art in general, as it is a significant artifact of Western culture.

Did I just claim that an anime song was a significant Western cultural influence? Well yes, but not quite in the way one may expect. For those more musically inclined, forgive me if the following does not come as a surprise to you.

The main theme of "Shin Sekai Yori" (From the New World) comes from a symphony of the same name, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893. "Going Home" is a well-known piece of classical music, often presented in beginner's books in a simplified version known as "Largo". I looked in my first piano book, and lo and behold there it was. I had played this song in 3rd grade and simply forgotten it.

As I researched the song in its original form and viewed its choir renditions, I was overcome with awe. It is a simple, nostalgic piece evoking the spirit of returning home after a long work day. And yet in the context of "Shin Sekai Yori", the piece had come to take on an unfathomable new significance to me, simply by virtue of its associations to the show's plot and themes. By listening to the original version and studying its history, the piece again gained a new dimension of meaning to me. Words cannot explain the sort of wonder I experienced in that moment.

I often like to ponder what makes a work of art, well, art. I feel this experience has made my understanding clearer in some mysterious way. This simple melody, played by many a beginner piano student, not only holds a time transcending emotion in its notes, but it also evolves with new artistic mediums and themes, lending its historical legacy to modern expression.

Truly wonderful! "Going Home" has grown from its origin to modern day media, maintaining and iterating on the emotions contained in its notes. Finally, after all this the piece has found me as I have, interestingly enough, returned home. What new meanings will I give those notes in my mind as I now play it myself, in this lazy summer evening as I relearn the piano? Perhaps this is but a small part of the wonder that drives the professional musician or composer...

Hyper-Reality (Commentary)

I first encountered this video on the Brown CS Facebook page, and it left a powerful impression on me. It portrays a dystopian future in which reality has been completely integrated with digital systems such as gamification, virtual reality, and other automated services. If you are unfamiliar with those terms, I recommend doing a quick search on their current iterations and concepts before watching the video.

The video opens by immediately engrossing the viewer in an overwhelmingly bright, flashy user interface packed with gameplay and various notifications. We are introduced to our protagonist, 42 year old Juliana Restrepo, whose heavy sighs and barren online profile imply some kind of inner turmoil or discontentment. The video takes place in Medellin, the second largest city in Columbia.

Immediately, the juxtaposition of the "inspiration guru's" robotic voice and the role "he" fulfills is jarring. The guru assigns jobs, assuring Juliana to "trust the app, it always chooses the right jobs for you!" But his advice obviously does not inspire Juliana, who is understandably upset that despite her education she is now a professional grocery shopper.

The video leaves a lot of questions unanswered about our first person protagonist's history. We can intuit that she is of somewhat low social class, and that she is dissatisfied with her life. But how did she arrive in her current situation? And is the cause of her inner emptiness the digital world or the daily grind of life in general? Juliana's thoughts of "resetting identity" make these questions even more ambiguous. On the one hand, the viewer can see how closely her identity has been tied to online systems, as her attempt is immediately doused by a fear of losing her "loyalty points." However, one wonders whether the gamification system itself is the problem, as it does not explain how Juliana arrived at the decision to "reset". All these questions presents a distinctly human problem underneath the sea of technological stimulation in front of us.

The second scene takes place in the store as Juliana does shopping for her client. She adopts a virtual dog that promises to reward her with even more loyalty points, and things seem to be proceeding smoothly until her system is hacked. As graphical glitches abound, Juliana incessantly questions the support staff as to whether her points are safe. As the staff member resets her system at the 4:00 mark, we catch a brief glimpse as to what the world looks like without the digital overlay. This sequence reinforces the ideas the video opened with, and introduces digital conflicts such as hacking and deeper impersonality as well (the customer service staff misidentifies Juliana the first time.)

The final scene takes place on the street as Juliana is attempting to verify her identity for the device reset. What occurs in the following scene is not entirely clear, but it appears that the hacker reveals her identity as she stabs Juliana in the hand, fulfilling the bio sample, resetting her identity, and deleting all her points. The video concludes as a distressed Juliana seems to place her faith in the gaudy digital interface of the catholic church.

Overall, "Hyper-Reality" presents the opposite view to Jane McGonigal's book: Reality is Broken. Gamification and other digital productivity boosters are often perceived as interesting at worst. But producer Matsuda envisions for us the dangers of relying on impersonal systems to dictate our lives, expanding the scope of his video from gamification to other current mobile trends. Despite our attempts to quantify human motivation and reward however, the blood that flows from Juliana's hand at the end of the video is a visceral reminder that we are still human beings in the end. Digital systems do not speak to human fallibility and unpredictability, nor can they create a deep sense of purpose despite the inspiration guru's optimistic words.

"Hyper-Reality" is an excellent and thought provoking work of art, I highly recommend giving it a watch.