kanna-chan's cafe

On that note, it just occurred to me that I registered for classes for the last time. I feel a little weird. Not good weird, not bad weird, just weird.

Haha, it’s actually kind of bittersweet. I’m leaving most of my friends behind. But it’s all good, because I’ll be able to go into my teaching career. Thank G-d, because the fall semester has been stressful as f**k (it’s a long story and I don’t want to bore you with the details).

That aside, let’s get to Anime Monday! Let’s see…what am I reviewing today?

Hm…too cliché…saving that for the fifth anniversary…saving that for #50…come on, there has to be SOMETHING here! Wait, what’s this? A musical anime that UtaPri probably ripped off of? I’ll take it! This is…La Corda d’Oro.

I’ll get to why I’m convinced UtaPri ripped off this anime later. For now, let’s focus on background and plot.

La Corda d’Oro (Italian for “The Golden String”) was originally a role-playing game targeted at a female audience under the Neoromance series from Koei. It was only released in Japan for Windows computers, the PS2, and the PSP in 2003, 2004, and 2005, respectively.

In 2004, a manga adaptation by Yuki Kure was released. You might recognize her from…um…wow, I haven’t heard of any of her other works. I guess that La Corda d’Oro is what she is best known for. She has other stuff under her belt, but it looks like La Corda d’Oro is her major work. Ok.

In 2006, an anime adaptation called La Corda d’Oro: Primo Passo premiered and ran from October 2006 to March 2007 for 26 episodes. In 2009, a 2-episode “special” aired called La Corda d’Oro: Secondo Passo aired. Then, in 2014, a spin-off series called La Corda d’Oro Blue Sky aired.

For this Anime Monday, I’ll be talking about La Corda d’Oro: Primo Passo.

The anime tells the story of Kahoko Hino, a girl who attends a school that is split into two departments: the general education department and the music department. She’s a student in the general education department who runs into a musical fairy (I couldn’t make that up if I tried) named Lili, who grants her a magical violin and a place in the school’s music competition.

Kahoko has no prior musical experience or knowledge and initially refuses, but Lili tells her that she can play any piece on the violin as long as she knows the tune and plays it with her heart. As the competition goes on, she grows attached to the other contenders, and vice versa (though they never admit it directly to her).

There isn’t really much to talk about with regards to the characters. All our anime tropes are there, as well as most of our UtaPri tropes and voice actors. Yeah, I bet you didn’t see that coming, did you? Turns out that a good amount of the characters for the anime are voiced by actors who also did voice acting for UtaPri.

This is going to be a relatively short review, because there isn’t much to talk about. I mean…well, we’ll get to that with the reason of why I gave the anime the rating I did.

Rating: 1/10 (and that's being generous)