Lovedol ~Lovely Idol~

Information of Anime

Lovedol is a six girl pop-idol group that was created by their manager Tomohiro Fujisawa.  With the success of the first two groups, he creates a third group under the orders of the company president.  In an event to debut the third group with four girls, it was sudden postponed during the event.  Asking his president why, he was told that the third batch is missing something.  Trying to get the third batch to debut, Tomohiro is desperately trying to search for the missing link.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  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.

The third batch of the Lovedol consist of Mai Nonomiya, Kotoha Kiryu, Hina Hojo, & Miu Nekoya.  Later on Ruri Fujisawa, Tomohiro's younger sister, joins the third batch to help out her brother.  Tomohiro later recruits Mizuki Sakaki, who does some performing on the streets with her guitar.  It was tough recruiting her as she doesn't have interest due to past managers trying to recruit her for money.  However, Tomohiro manages to convince her by having her attend a Lovedol event & praising her talents.  Despite having six girls now, the third batch is still missing something.

Lovedol members from the first two batches help out Tomohiro & his third batch individually.  Whether it's jobs, tasks, or promos, they are there to help.  Also, they seem to have some attachment to their old manager Tomohiro.  Despite these improvements, the third batch is still missing something.  This create concerns as the president decides to have Mizuki go solo instead as the third batch is dragging her down & relying on her too much for support.  Although Tomohiro doesn't like the decision, he obeys & ask Mizuki to go solo who doesn't like it as well.  However when the group continues to be lacking something as an event for them is approaching in less than a week, Mizuki has starts to have second thoughts about the solo debut.  However, Mizuki decides to stay in the group.  But another problem arises which deals with her mother.

The final arc sees Mizuki having a tough time with practice.  She leaves the group for awhile to meet her mother as her mother is the person she wants revenge on.  In the meantime, the third batch trains hard in the final two weeks before their debut with a lot of difficulties.  With two weeks left, they struggle to get ticket sales up for a full house & training for the big event.  Things lighten up when the previous batches help out in promoting the third batch's event.  Meanwhile, Mizuki learns why her mother sung to her when she decided to stop.  Realizing what it is, Mizuki returns to her group as things are looking good now as they approach the day of the event.

The show ends with the third batch's debut performance carrying a large crowd & being very successful.  The company approves their debut & feels that they need to have a bigger stage due to their rising popularity.

My Personal Review

Lovedol ~Lovely Idol~ is pretty much about the process of how idols in Japanese go about & what they do.  This shouldn't be confused to the XBox 360's game The Idol Master.  This anime seems to be going on the idol fame popularity that's going on in Japan.

Animation

The character designs are on the average side.  Although they are somewhat cute, the girls are too strikingly similar.  The faces are exactly the same.  It was very hard for me to tell about some of the girls with somewhat similar hairstyles.  After somewhat telling who's who, the designs started to look too plain.  Luckily, the male characters are somewhat different since there is hardly many male characters here.  But, there are a lot of times where the faces will get distorted.  It looks very ugly.  Plus, the limbs are sometimes too thin from the looks of it.  It's not very well done overall.

The backgrounds are okay.  Not a lot of details & it does have it's dull side at times.

The colours are dull & bright.  The outlines on the characters & drawings are quite thick & noticeable in some areas.

In terms of the animation movement, it's a mixture.  Sometimes the movements are realistic & sometimes the movements are not normal.  But they are quite smooth with some choppy frames found.  At times, you can see some of the dance moves being out of place & looking strange.  You can also say the same with the let movements from walking & running.

Sound

The sound effects are really on the silly side.  Probably because to make the idol show cute.  The sounds aren't too clear at times & they go off cue a bit. 

The seiyuus here are pretty average.  Some of the voices are bit too high pitched.  Probably sets the images of idols well in this case.  But it can be nerve wrecking at times.  Overall, I felt the cast is somewhat weak.

There are a lot of pop idol related music here, which is pretty much expected.  In the first episode, almost 75% of it was music.  Almost made me think that the show is a musical.  Some of the music is good. but there are some that are a bit too cute.  At least, it focuses on the idol theme very well.  I was quite surprised on how the sound quality was for the final episode where the third batch was singing a live performance song.  It didn't give that impression nor felt like the girls were lip singing.  It wasn't close of it being played from a CD as well.  It was pretty bad.

Story

The show gives the audience some idea on how the idol entertainment industry works.  The jobs they do & the hardships they get.  Watching the show, I felt it doesn't touch the idol industry well.  Although I don't know much about that field, the show didn't give me a good impression on how hard upcoming & rookie idols get.  It didn't draw too much attention to me as well.   Although real elements such as possible breakups like the situation where Mizuki offered a solo debut are in the show, it seems like common knowledge to a lot of people as most of us are already exposed to these things from real idol groups.  Overall, the show didn't give a good story about making idols.

In the final arc, we see something that isn't idol related a bit.  It's more drama with the situation with Mizuki & her mother.  Although it's a real-lifelike situation, it's not too good.  It's not a situation that you really see much.  Although the show ends in a positive way in terms of the hardships of reaching idol status, it didn't give an interesting plot that can hold on to the viewers.  Although the ending gave a good debut performance, the way it shows how nervous the girls were & preparing for it didn't seem too real.

Overall Conclusion

Lovedol ~Lovely Idol~ is a somewhat average show that rides on the idol popularity in Japan.  The show gets its face out there, but somewhat fails to tell a story about the idol world.  If you want to watch something that talks about the idol industry, you would probably don't want to watch this one as you will find nothing new here.

Lovedol ~Lovely Idol~ gets a 6.5/10.  The story isn't very good & the surprises are too predictable.  The show seems to exist due to the popularity of the idol industry in Japan & tries to profit from it.  There are better idol related shows out there with a more depth look in the industry.

Last updated on January 21, 2008