Video Girl Ai


Dammit, if it can happen to him, why not me?!




Review by: M.H. Torringjan

Length: Six episode OAV
Genre: Romantic comedy
Watched: Subbed.

I know what you're thinking. "Video girl" sounds like they're talking porn. Well, get your mind outta the gutter! Well, not too far, but most of the way. This is one of those romantic comedies that lives in ecchi-land at times and is sentimental at others. I, personally, will question neither.

Plot summary: Moteuchi Yota is a poor, lonely dork with a crush on his best friend, Hayakawa Moemi. She's got a crush on their other friend, Niimai Takashi. Luckily for the audience, he doesn't have one on Yota. That'd just be weird, IMO. Then again, it would get them the all important drooling shonen-ai fangirl demographic, so it could swing either way, if you'll forgive the pun. Anyway, after the whole Takashi-crush thingy gets out and he turns Moemi down, both Moemi and Yota're feeling pretty depressed. Yota then does what any guy in his position would do, he stops in a magical porn video store and picks up a video recommended by the creepy old guy who runs the place. Just how he wanted to spend his Friday night!
Okay, so it might not have been porn, but that's what it really seemed like from an American perspective. Anyway, when he gets home and turns the porno on, preparing himself for the depression of seeing someone getting more sex than he is (sounds a lot like Craig and myself anytime we watch Love Hina), he suddenly finds himself with a lapful of cute chick. She's named Ai, and she's there to cheer him up because he's such a nice guy. She's only there for a certain amount of time, though, so she has to make the most of her time. She finds out that Yota has a crush on Moemi and vows to help him and Moemi get together. In the later episodes, though, she realizes that she's beginning to fall for Yota, since he's the lucky nice guy dork of the anime. This causes strain on Ai, though, because video girls aren't supposed to fall in love. Of course, Yota's so wrapped up in Moemi that he's completely oblivious. And it just goes on like that for 6 episodes until it gets all End of Eva on our asses in the last episode or two.

Artwork: Well, nothing special about the scenery in this anime until the last episode or two, at which point Salvador Dali could have done the art, and nobody would have known the difference. I can only question one thing about the character designs, and that is the hair styling. Now, this isn't such a big deal, other than the fact that it's weird. I mean, Takashi looks like he's got little punk-rocker satan horns in his hair, and you just have to wonder how much hair spray he had to use to get it that way, and how much he had to sniff to want to make it that way.

Music: The soundtrack of this series consists almost solely of j-pop and some instrumentals. Some of the J-pop's decent, some of it bites. The point is, the soundtrack wasn't all that well integrated into the series, I thought. The opening track is a nice, poppy opening whose melody gets slapped into the end of the episode at times, which is interesting.

Characters: The creators of this series went out of their ways to make you like the characters. I mean, you feel sorry for Yota as Moemi completely ignores him in favor of Takashi. Moemi seems to get by on cuteness alone, and boy does she ever! Ai's quandary with Yota combined with the fact that he's acting exactly like Moemi towards Ai. She's probably the most likeable character in the series, really. Takashi is a decent guy and a nice friend to Yota, trying everything he can to get Moemi to realize that Yota's got the hots for her. However, he must die because he made cute, cute Moemi cry. Thus it has been decreed.

Plot: The romance triangle thing has been done before, and by other animes. This one seems to be getting by based on the appeal of the chicks and the breast-in-cheek sense of humor provided by Ai. I mean, this whole thing is like an animated soap opera with lots of cute chicks. I kept expecting Takashi to suddenly out and tell Moemi that he couldn't date her because he was really her long lost evil twin brother with AIDS and a portfolio the size of New Jersey. The plot is fairly generic, but the execution is well-done enough to be enjoyable.

CHICKS!!!: There are only two chicks here, but one of them is just aces! Moemi's a bit too wish-washy and oblivious for my liking, but geezes, is she cute! I mean, how can I not like a face like that?! Then, there's Ai. She's the main attraction of the series. Her determination and sense of duty are just touching, as is her propensity to hide her true feelings behind a mask of screwing around. You find yourself feeling sorry for her as Yota completely ignores her, the lucky bastard. The creators had to go out of their ways to make Ai as appealing a character as was possible, and they succeeded. Her appearance is not as drop-dead gorgeous as other chicks, but her personality more than makes up for it.

Overall: The series is a nice character-driven series that doesn't slow it down too much with over-sentimentality. Well, not much, anyway. Lemme put it this way, the sentimentality is there, but it doesn't slow down the series much. The length of the series is just about right, because any shorter and I wouldn't have felt satisfied at the end and I don't know how it could have gone longer. It's not a masterpiece of animation that everyone *must* own or die by law, but it's a good-time piece of fluff you can watch when you're in a good mood. I wouldn't say it's date material or for the recently broken up, though. In those cases, injury is sure to abound on someone's part.

IN A NUTSHELL:
+Great, likable characters
+Cute, cute, CUTE chicks
+Fun, upbeat anime most of the time
-Soundtrack bites
-Artwork's mediocre
-Plot's generic

Final rating: 8.5/10



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