Elfen Lied OVA

Information of Anime

The story takes place between somewhere between episode 11 & 12 where Nana moves in with Kouta & the gang.  At this time, Nana escapes from the lab & decides to kill Lucy herself.

Some people consider this OVA as either episode 14 or 11.5.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Basically, we get to see the "missing" parts of where Nana learns to live with Lucy in place & how her father decides to leave the lab as well.  The majority of it is Nana learning to accept Lucy's peaceful side as she tries to turn her in & kill her.

My Personal Review

Elfen Lied OVA is not only fanservice, but something that ties in-between the TV show's storyline.  It helps the viewers understand more about the character relationships.  Think of it as a missing episode.  Strangely enough, it's doesn't have the extreme violence & gore level here.  But, it still has some nudity.

Animation

Same as the TV show.  The character designs are cute.  The characters have big eyes & nice small chubby faces.  However, all the girls here look pretty much the same.  The Diclonius are worse as they are exactly alike.  However, this one has a lot of weird facial designs when the girls feel down.  It's almost like watching a different version of Elfen Lied.

The backgrounds are on the dull side.  It's not very detailed and seems like rough work.  But it's kind of a good thing since the setting takes place in an old town really.

The colours are mainly dull.  The outlines of the characters are pretty thick & heavy on the faces.  The brighter colours seems to be more flat & grainy at times.

The animation movements are pretty realistic & fluid.  No heavy choppy frames or the like.

Sound

The same as the TV show.  The sound effect are a mixture of real & silliness.  The volume & projection is clear as you can hear bodies being blown apart & blood being splattered.

The seiyuus aren't too bad here as they are all the same.  No need for adjustments.  But the voices above average in my view.  Nyuu sounds cute with her Nyuus.  But when she becomes Lucy, she sounds too much like a boy.  Maybe I'm too use to that seiyuu's voice in her past works where she does a lot of male roles.

All the same as the TV show, even the opening & ending themes.  The music has a lot of orchestral theme music.  It creates that eerie mood well with its dark tones.  I really like the opening theme, especially the music box version.  Makes me want to buy a music box with with tone.  The ending theme is a bit too joyful for the show.  Then again, we are talking about a show when cute girls are killing each other brutally.  It's still a great song though.

Story

The OVA blends in very well for an episode that occurs in-between the TV's shows storyline.  It displays how the character relationship development between Lucy & Nana nicely & it seems they may have met before in the past.  I personally enjoyed the OVA.  But it was very strange not to see any extreme violence or gore here.  If the TV show was very close to Japanese TV standards, it would have been interesting to see it going beyond that here since OVAs tend to have little limitations.  But the writers decided not to do it here, which I thought was fair enough.  The series is more story based than violence really.  But, the amount of cuteness is entertaining to say the least.

Overall Conclusion

Elfen Lied OVA is a must watch OVA if you have seen the TV show.  If you haven't seen the TV show yet, it's strongly recommended to watch that first before the OVA or else it won't make any sense to you.  However, the TV show is strangely gruesome whereas the OVA is more of a cute & normal OVA.  The cute factor here shouldn't make you think the TV is the same.

Elfen Lied OVA gets a nine out of ten.  It fills in the so-called "gaps" from the TV show where it couldn't explain some of the story elements in there.  Plus, understanding how the relationship Lucy & Nana got friendly is explained very well here.

Last updated on December 26, 2007