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Category:    Home > Reviews > Animé TV > Piano V.1 (Animé TV)

Piano – The Melody Of A Young Girl’s Heart

Movement One: Secret Love (Animé TV)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Episodes: C+

 

 

In an unusually intelligent for female-aimed Animé series, Miu Nomura is a young lady who loves music and in her junior high years, will discover the music of the instrument and her heart in Piano – The Melody Of A Young Girl’s Heart.  Instead of being sexploitation, juvenile or supposedly comic, this series makes a more serious-if-predictable attempt to show the coming of age of the heroine in the story.  In all this, it is not slow-moving.

 

Of course, this does not mean the characters around her are free of dysfunction, but it is done with more respect of the young viewing audience, something oddly and intentionally missing from most Animé series.  Though it could have been more aggressive in the core of the storytelling and eventually drags a bit, the ambition to do an Animé like this should be applauded and maybe the show will pick up in later installments.  Secret Love is the name of the collection, though the actual episodes are not titled.  This is for roughly 13 years of age, though Right Stuf does not mark their product with any age indicators like other Animé labels.

 

The full frame 1.33 X 1 image is nicely transferred, but has the same intentional softening of the image throughout that is as clichéd as it is annoying.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo in both English and Japanese offers no surrounds of any kind, but is as clean and clear, as Dolby’s compression will allow.  Extras include the main voice actress talking about the show in Special Epilogue One, character bios, original character sketches, line art gallery, textless opening and six trailers for other Right Stuf Animé releases.  Right Stuf is producing some top rate Animé DVDs only matched right now by Geneon.  How the competition will affect the two companies should be very interesting to watch.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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