Forest of Piano Second Season
ピアノの森 第2シリーズ (Piano no Mori (TV) 2nd Season)
- Drama
- Music
- Performing Arts
- School
- Episodes
- 12
- Duration
- 25 min per ep
- Aired
- Jan 28, 2019 to Apr 15, 2019
- Status
- Finished Airing
Synopsis
As the Chopin International Piano Competition begins, Kai Ichinose and Shuuhei Amamiya join a field of gifted pianists arriving from across the globe, each determined to advance. With exacting judges and an unforgiving format, even celebrated prodigies can be cut without warning, raising the pressure on every performance.
Competitors step onto the stage for different reasons—prize money, family expectations, or the simple need to be heard—but only one can claim the top by truly capturing the spirit of Chopin’s music. Along the way, rivalries and friendships sharpen, family bonds are put to the test, and each musician searches for a sound they can call their own.
Otaku Consensus
Forest of Piano Second Season earns a solid, niche-favorite reputation rather than breakout acclaim, reflected in its 7.46 MAL score and 73/100 AniList score. Hiroyuki Yamaga’s direction works best when the Chopin Competition becomes a pressure chamber for Kai and Shuuhei’s contrasting relationships with music, but the most persistent drawback is the CGI-forward performance presentation, which can make technically ambitious piano scenes feel less organic than the drama around them.
Why You Should Watch
Watch Forest of Piano Second Season if you want a classical-music anime that treats performance as interpretation, not just spectacle. It scratches a similar itch to Your Lie in April’s emotional musicianship and Nodame Cantabile’s concert-hall world, but with a sharper competition format and a more sustained focus on Chopin as a measuring stick for identity, class, discipline, and instinct. Viewers who enjoy tournament arcs without shounen escalation will find the appeal here: advancement depends on touch, phrasing, temperament, and whether a pianist can make familiar repertoire feel personally inevitable. The season is especially rewarding for fans who like rivalries built around artistic philosophy rather than simple winning and losing.
Key Characters
- KKai Ichinose
Kai remains compelling because his playing is framed less as polished pedigree and more as a challenge to what elite institutions believe a pianist is supposed to sound like.
- SShuuhei Amamiya
Shuuhei is the series’ cleanest portrait of inherited pressure, a gifted musician whose refinement is inseparable from the expectations attached to his family name.
What Makes It Stand Out
- 1
The second season narrows the series into a 12-episode competition drama built around the Chopin International Piano Competition, giving the story a stricter, elimination-based structure than a typical school music anime.
- 2
Gaina’s production uses a CGI-assisted approach for performance material, a visible stylistic choice also reflected in AniList’s CGI tag and central to how viewers tend to discuss the season’s strengths and weaknesses.
- 3
Director Hiroyuki Yamaga emphasizes the institutional side of classical music: judges, formats, international competitors, and the difference between technical correctness and a performance that communicates Chopin’s spirit.
- 4
The ending theme connects voice-acting-adjacent anime music talent with a dedicated song team: Rie Murakawa performs it, while Gou Sakabe handles both composition and arrangement with lyrics by hisakuni.
Fun Facts & Trivia
- Fun fact 1
- The season aired unusually late in the winter 2019 cycle, running from January 28 to April 15, 2019, rather than starting in the first full week of January.
- Fun fact 2
- Makoto Isshiki is credited as the original creator, tying the TV anime directly to a creator-driven source rather than an anime-original music project.
- Fun fact 3
- Masatsune Noguchi served as animation director on episodes 2, 5, 8, and 11, giving him a recurring production role across the season rather than a single-episode credit.
- Fun fact 4
- The series received multiple localized dub production tracks, with Robert Buchholz and Megan Buchholz credited as English ADR directors and Marco Aurélio Campos credited for Brazilian Portuguese ADR direction.
- Fun fact 5
- Despite modest mainstream visibility on MAL, where it sits at popularity rank #3381, the season has over 26,000 MAL votes and 164 AniList favorites, showing a dedicated audience for its classical-performance focus.
Studios
- Gaina
