Amazing!
After watching this I was left speechless. I actually watched it four times just to absorb the story (that and because it's a really epic flash :3). I mean, there's just so much to see in this animation. It skips crazily from scene to scene, full with detail and some hidden references. This is definitely the best music video I've seen on Newgrounds so far, good job! :D
The animation is just superb. It's not very smooth at times, but heck, you've worked a year and a half on this. I'll have to cut you some slack. Besides, a lot of the animation was very detailed and it shows that you put a lot of hard work in it. Still, some things could've been better, such as when they were running inside the school at the beginning. The leg animations were all the same :P. I should stop nitpicking xD.
The art style was superb. Sure, there were a few cliché things such as the mouths occasionally growing twice as big as they're supposed to be, but heck, that comes with every Animé so I won't complain. What I can complain about, though, would be the fact that the characters looked so similar. I mean, does everyone have to have white hair? Lol, I think if you vary the hair colour, the different characters will be more distinguishable, since right now some of the characters look similar to each other. That, and I don't think that everyone having white hair is a huge coincedence xP. Yeah, I understand it could be an art style, but having the same hair colour makes it harder to understand who's who...
However, what was quite impressive was how you blended real life pictures with animations. Usually, they look really out of place with each other, but I quickly forgot that the backgrounds were actually real-life images, and not drawn backgrounds because they were blended in so well. Good job with that =D.
The concept, unfortunately, is generic, but that hardly matters much. What I don't really like about the story was that it was pretty hard to grasp. It might be because of the fact that the characters look similar to each other, or because of the fact that the approach to the story is very subtle (how were we to know that the protagonist waving her hands constantly meant that she wanted to be a conductor, or how do we know that she failed in achieving this goal?), but somehow this Flash *almost* felt random. I mean, if I didn't read the story in the Author's comments, I would have not got head or tail of what was going on. There were a few things that I still don't understand, such as why the protagonist was angry when she saw her friend play the violin...
Having said that, the fact that the story was hard to follow didn't ruin the Flash at all. The first time I watched this, I had no clue what was happening, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. There were some funny parts, some emotional parts, and some interesting parts throughout the submission which really kept the viewer captivated and interested in what would happen next. The fact that the scenes switch so quickly also make this really fun to watch, especially more than once, because the more you watch it, the more you manage to build up a story and see how one scene is related to another.
The audio was extremely good. There was some voice acting which was great, and the song was very high quality, which is a rare find in Flash submissions here on NG. Not only was it high quality, but it was damn catchy too xD. So yeah, superb audio. Subtitles would obviously help here, but then again they might distract the viewer from the Flash itself (since it's so action-packed and all...) and cause him/her to miss a scene or two, so if you do add subtitles, then if I were you I'd definitely make them optional or something.
To summarize, I pointed out a few flaws here and there in this submission, but they definitely aren't enough to reduce a point from my review. This deserves the 10 I gave it for sure, and it surely deserves more than just 40k views and one award. I hope you keep up the amazing work, and great job once again on this submission!
10/10
5/5
-Review Request Club-
