AnimeSugoi

You know an anime is pretty popular if it becomes a live action movie and Nodame Cantabile is no exception. I really liked the anime for its great characters, story, relationship development, and of course the music. Most of the actors picked for this animation, in my opinion, look very much like the characters from the anime (screen shot comparison of both live and anime from the same scene) and they really act out the characters part so well. This includes Chiaki’s more “abusive/comedic” attitude towards Nodame, Masumi’s “actions”, and even down to Mine’s dad feeding Nodame a bunch of Chinese food.

Impression:
From above you can tell I really liked what I watched. The story line stays true to the anime but combines a couple episodes/lessons together, for example Lesson 1, 4, and a bit of 2 combined in the live version for Lesson 1, that seamlessly flow with each other. This lesson was about Chiaki meeting Nodame for the first time after he was dropped from his highly qualified pianist sensei (teacher) to a lower sensei that has a reputation for teaching the worst piano students where Chiaki gets to know Nodame. What I really liked was the funny cleaning scenes of Chiaki cleaning not only Nodame’s “dump of a apartment” (I actually mean dump for all around her apartment were old snacks eaten, grown old, or just plain burnt as in her “cream stew”. Also clothes were strewn everywhere and you can barely find anything though Chiaki did find a mushroom growing from Nodame’s laundry) but Nodame herself who only bathes every other day and washes her hair every three days. This episode ends with Chiaki finding out that the newest conducting sensei to be none other than the famous Stresemann who he mistook for a lecherous thief, turns out he is actually lecherous but no thief. If I had watched the live action version first I would be stunned that an anime came out because of it, for I probably would have thought it was another Japanese drama type of show that was pretty good.

(Note:If you didn’t notice the note above the screen shots are a comparison of both the live action lesson and anime from the same scene)

Chiaki, played by Hiroshi Tamaki, is just as funny and abusive (though in a comical way) as the anime version but he’s live lol.

Personally I didn’t really think the anime Nodame was really cute until the later lessons where she developed a more “womanly” appearance but the live action Nodame, played by Juri Ueno, is very kawaii (cute)

The only character that really looked different from their anime counterpart was Stresemenn, played by Naoto Takenaka, but his character portrayal was excellent, down to the lowest lecherous move, so I don’t mind ^^.

A couple of very comical scenes including Chiaki cleaning Nodame’s room and Nodame herself lol.


I thought this was interesting, they never actually showed Chiaki’s “crash landing” in the anime so seeing this scene in the live action raised my curiosity, if you watched the anime version or read the manga (I never read the manga so it might be slightly different) then you know why I thought this scene was interesting.