Recently, I saw the first four episodes of the Love Hina anime.
The Love Hina anime can be summed up in a few words- it is nowhere near as good as the manga.
("How could this be?!" some may ask. "Love Hina is made from Love Hinium Alloy!")
This makes Alex sad, for two reasons. The first reason is that there was so much potential to make Love Hina the greatest damned thing ever. The second reason is that most Western people who ever have any experience with Love Hina are never going to read the manga.
But perhaps that is a good thing? If they read the manga, they might spit on the series, and send Xebec out of business. The Love Hina anime series is certainly not bad, by any means. It's a funny little show, and sweet in places, and Kaolla is just the best thing ever no matter what format she's in (except when she's dubbed, but that's another matter entirely).
Love Hina also suffers some changes to the story that I didn't think were necessary.
The old men are a rather amusing addition, but they wouldn't fit into the manga at all. Their presence really does make Love Hina an entirely different beast altogether.
And I absolutely hate how Shinobu's gone all weird, and how they gave her a divorce story. Shinobu may run away from Keitaro, but she does not strike me as the sort to run off crying all the time at even the slightest thing.
Pah! A pox on Xebec! A pox! (No... I don't mean that. Keep on making anime, Xebec!)
The famous Naru on top of Keitaro scene is much better in the manga, and where's my jello bounce in the anime?! We want our jello bounce, damn it! (...wait... do we really want the jello bounce?)
The fact that Naru is the only one who really accepts him is also pretty much completely contradictory to the anime.
My biggest problem so far is that Motoko's reaction to Keitaro at first really makes absolutely no sense in the anime.
*Possible Spoiler*
In the manga, Motoko gets a cold. Never having had a cold before, she thinks that the symptoms are those of love. Motoko does not want to be in love with Keitaro, and challenges him to a fight so that she can get rid of the love. She collapses during the fight, and realises that she has a cold. She is relieved that it is not love. In the anime, however, she challenges him after she finds out she has a cold, for "taking advantage of her". Then, despite supposedly being over the cold, she collapses anyway. Eh? Also, the means by which she got the cold in the anime don't even make sense.
*End Possible Spoiler*
Of course, it's unreasonable to expect the Love Hina anime to include everything that the manga had- it's incredibly difficult to fit 123 chapters into 24 episodes and 5 OVA. But when they use story elements that were in the manga, I would have liked that they were kept accurate, or at the very least made sense.
I would really like it if they had animated the tour of Japan saga (where everyone goes looking for everyone else), but I think that that would have been too hard to do.
The animation is generally very good, and the violence seems more extreme than it was presented in the manga. I would have liked it if they kept the constant Motoko sword to throat stuff, too.
One of my biggest non-story related issues with the Love Hina anime is that the character designs were ruined.
For reasons unknown to me, Ken Akamatsu did not do any design on the series. They got someone else (Makoto Uno, if Mike Toole is anything to go by) to do the designs, and really, they're not very good at all.
Sure, you can recognise who the characters are supposed to be (and thank God Tama seems unchanged), but really, they've been butchered by having their chins rounded. The faces are bigger, as opposed to the sharper faces that Akamatsu gave them.
Akamatsu knew what he was doing- and he actually approved of the anime series (saying in one of his volumes that he needed to learn to set his VCR), so I don't see they didn't have the time to just get him to design character. Maybe in that aspect I don't know what I'm talking about (not entirely knowing what character design for a series entails), but the designs should have remained the same.
However, there is one thing that is absolutely perfect about the Love Hina: the seiyuu. Yes, this is quite simply one of the best ensemble casts I have ever witnessed. Much of the cast also starred in that other favourite of mine, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040. It stars the catalyst of my Golden Hayashibara Rule, Megumi Hayashibara! It has the ever delightful Yuji Ueda! It has Satsuki Yukino (and I'd be really interested to see what she's done with the role of Mutsumi)! It has the totally lovely Aya Hisakawa (I've still yet to see Amalla in the manga though- is she real or a fabrication?)! It is said to have completely shot Yui Horie to stardom (though why her role as Chibi-Galatea didn't do that, I'll never know)!
If nothing else, Love Hina is a case of the best casting ever. Not one problem was had with their choice of voice. Admittedly, Kaolla sounded a little younger than I imagined at first, but she's actually really quite good.
Although I think it to be inferior to the manga, the Love Hina anime is clearly very good any way, and I'm certainly going to be buying it all.
The fact that my friends and I laughed with glee simply because Kaolla came onto the scene is reason enough, I think.
There you have it; my current thoughts on the Love Hina anime series.
Ohayo, Leon-chan! � 2001, Alexander Doenau and the Doenau Anime Corporation.
Please do not take content from this site without permission.
Thank you.
Suicide... Delicious?