Writer CDB argues in a column for Bunshun Online that Tomoyo Kurosawa's performance as high school student Kumiko Oumae in the second part of the final Sound! Euphonium film belongs in the history of great anime voice acting. The film opened in Japan on September 11, 2026, according to the anime's official site.
The column's headline asks why an anime about an ordinary school concert band is so affecting, and calls the now-completed series a sign of Kyoto Animation's full revival after many hardships (headline translated).
CDB makes the case as a newcomer. The writer had never watched the TV anime from its first episode, knowing it only as a well-regarded Kyoto Animation work set in a school concert band, and went to see the first part in theaters before summer assuming that a story running more than 10 years across three seasons and 39 episodes could not be followed from its conclusion alone.
It could, the column says. The film carries more than 20 characters and does not stop to caption or introduce them, yet each band member's personality and relationship to the protagonist registered without explanation. CDB credits the voice cast for that: the voices given to the individual characters separate them so sharply, the column argues, that a viewer senses the shape of each person intuitively rather than through dialogue that spells it out.
CDB also writes that the source material came as a surprise. The original Sound! Euphonium is neither a manga nor a light novel but an early novel by Ayano Takeda, which the column dates to 2013.
The column quotes a passage from that book in which Reina Kousaka asks Kumiko whether she does not have a fairly bad personality, then says she would like to peel off her good-girl skin. According to the column, the scene was restructured for the first season of the TV anime two years after the novel's publication, with the characters' lines changed to standard Japanese and the exchange performed by Kurosawa and Chika Anzai.