Anime review: Tari Tari

Title: Tari Tari

Year: 2012

What is it about: A schoolgirl who formed a new choir club to compete with another choir club in the same school.

My review: Tari Tari. Weird name, I know. But this one is definitely worth watching. I had always been a fan of music-themed anime. That was when I first watched K-ON. I fell in love immediately, until I found this anime a year later that is. And it was completely by accident.

So how is this anime better than K-ON (no offense for K-ON fans out there. I still love K-ON)? While K-ON lives up to its Fuwa Fuwa reputation, Tari Tari focuses more on storyline. K-ON focuses on performing as many happy and fluffy songs as possible, hence the two-season anime. Tari Tari on the other hand, merely have 13 episodes.

In that 13 episodes, the writer managed to get some drama out of every important characters in the anime. Most drama, however, comes from Wakana whom she has lost her dear mother without realizing how much love her mother had poured on her. Wakana's mother apparently is a very skilled composer, and is very famous. Most of the songs in the anime are composed by her, or at least inspired by her. She is almost more important than the main character who founded the new choir club.

In Tari Tari, we see characters becoming emotional one by one. Each character will either develop a mood swing, or gets into a conflict every 2 or 3 episodes. This includes the principal and vice principal of the school, which so happens to be the teacher and friend of Wakana's mother respectively. Don't underestimate this anime though, because it is capable of delivering meaningful storyline and come up with songs that touches. This anime also stresses the importance of teamwork and self-trust, to the point of denying the higher authorities in order to do what's right.

Overall, this anime is nice and fun to watch, but like always there will be certain parts in this awesome anime that will be flawed. I feel there are some things put in that anime that are rather unnecessary. Among them is the conflict between Sawa, a jockey-wannabe, and her father. They could have thought of a better storyline, or at least a better solution to the problem.

I am amazed by the final episode where the awesome performance promised in the middle of the series are performed. It definitely lived up to the promise. There is another problem, not with the anime itself, but rather the soundtracks. I'm not saying the soundtrack are bad, but quite the opposite actually. I've searched many times for the full version of certain songs in Tari Tari, but I just couldn't find them. As it turns out, these soundtracks were released well after the anime so it did took me quite a while before I managed to find these songs. There is however, one track which I still couldn't find the mp3 file although it existed in the popular rhythm game called Osu!.

In conclusion, as I have watched this anime many times, I will usually just watch the first few episodes and immediately skips to the last few episodes to avoid all the melodrama in between. I've got to say though that this is one anime in my list of best anime.

Rating (out of 10): 8