Years after both its manga and film adaptation have been released, the drama work, “Piano no Mori” a.k.a. “Piano in the Forest” has officially gained an anime adaptation. Confirmed by NHK’s official website on Monday, more details will be revealed for the new adaption in this year’s 48th issue of Kodansha’s Morning magazine on Thursday.
Currently there is no news regarding the staff to work on the production but it has been announced that there will be auditions held by Nippon Columbia for pianists who wish to have a chance at playing the roles of main characters Kai, Shuuhei and Takako during their childhood years.
The manga series was first released in 1998 and was initially serialized by Kodansha’s Young Magazine Uppers until it moved to Weekly Morning and yet the series went under a hiatus in 2002 before resuming in 2006. The series ran until 2015 and spanned for a total of 26 volumes. It was in 2007 that the series gained a feature film under the production of Madhouse with Masayuki Kojima as its director with a feature performance by renowned pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy.
The story of the series tells of two young boys as different as can be. Kai is a son born t a prostitute and is a rambunctious young boy. Shuuhei on the other hand is the child of two prestigious pianists and has been working his hardest in becoming the best. The one thing these two boys seem to have in common is a love for music. For one day under a dare by a group of bullies, Shuuhei discovers Kai playing a supposedly haunted piano and seems to be the only one to be able to bring sound out of the thought-to-be-broken piano.
This sparks a connection between the two boys as Shuuhei brings the wild but prodigious playing Kai into the world of professional piano playing. This is Kai’s journey as he goes he goes from playing within the forest to playing on stage.
During the manga’s run it won the Japan Media Arts Festival prize in the Manga category in 2008 and just recently it has been confirmed that the series has reached 6 million copies in print.
Source AnimeNewsNetwork