Anime: Ao no Orchestra

Character design is average to good, but fails several times in human faces in 3/4 seen from behind (who get disproportionate and a kind of cubist faces).

The animation is average to bad (e.g., locomotion mechanics - when characters walk, they become very stiff and rigid), using still frames too often, but most of all, resorting to digital animation whenever it needs to portray music scenes, characters playing, etc. (which would require more and better hand animation work), which not only breaks the style of the hand animation but gives a very artificial and mechanized (little to no organic and natural) look to the scenes.

The series is also full of basic observations and platitudes about classical music, which would hardly come out of the mouth of a student with the level of technical and musical knowledge as the characters are supposed to possess. And as one of the most wonderful characteristics of music is to speak and discourse without words (even words in music are worth essentially through their musical value) to clog these musical scenes with needless words only impoverishes the music's potential.

I believe that since they assume that the target audience has no knowledge of classical music, they feel the need to explain a lot of things, constantly including the thoughts of the characters (as if the actions, scenes and characters were not enough to speak for themselves). Good animation speaks for itself and does not need to be explained in detail and explained through words.

Since I haven't seen the series all the way through, I can't evaluate certain parameters, such as the quality of character development. But since I cannot distance myself from the digital scenes and how mechanized and robotic the scenes and characters become, I cannot appreciate and enjoy the series.

I will watch it until the end (even because anime series and movies about the classical music universe are rare), but the validity of my observations are extended to general and fundamental characteristics in any series, regardless of story and character developments.