[ DRAWN & QUARTERED ]
‘Love Hina’ cast draws
from the usual suspects
Romantic comedies in anime and manga are a dime a dozen these days. Pick 10 titles at random off the shelves, and there's a good chance that several of those titles will be a romantic comedy. There's also an equally good chance that said titles will feature a hapless loser who's never been lucky in love, following him along when he just so happens to be plopped into situations with a bevy of gorgeous girls.Which brings us to this week's specimen under the "D&Q" microscope, "Love Hina."
"Love Hina" is the story of Keitaro Urashima, a student who has tried many times -- and failed just as often -- to get into Tokyo University, to fulfill a promise he made to a cute girl back when he was a wee young lad.
BANDAI
The path to true love is filled with wild hi-jinks for Keitaro, right, Naru and the other girls of "Love Hina."
To recuperate from his latest setback, he goes to his grandmother's rural hot-springs inn to relax. Problem is, no one told him that his grandmother decided to retire from the inn business, converting it to an all-girls dorm. So as he settles in for a nice, relaxing bath, the girls show up, clad in only towels and smiles.
Cue the hilarity and strike a blow -- or several -- for girl power, as the residents proceed to lay the smackdown on his bumbling butt.
The torture stops only when Keitaro's aunt tells the girls that with the retirement of the original owner, the dorm now needs a new resident manager. That new manager, of course, is Keitaro.
So the girls grudgingly accept him ... after beating the living daylights out of him. Again.
The cast of characters seems like it was taken from the prototypical list of Characters to Use When Concocting a Wacky Romantic Comedy. You have the token offbeat foreigner (Kaolla Su), the uptight girl who has a lot to learn about being a girl (sword master Motoko Aoyama), the shy young girl with deep, probing eyes (Shinobu Maehara), the sexpot (Mitsune Konno), the klutzy comedy relief (Mutsumi Otohime) and the feisty girl with a heart of gold (Naru Narusegawa).
Gradually -- as is customary with these romantic comedies -- everyone eventually falls in love with Keitaro. But there can be only one true love for him. And the path to that true love is filled with plenty of wild hi-jinks.
There's certainly a lot of "love" out there in anime and manga forms -- Tokyopop finished publishing the full translated 14-volume story last year, and Bandai has released the complete 24-episode TV series run plus three movies over nine DVDs.
Where the two forms diverge is in its treatment of the story. While the manga relies on nonstop action and gags building on gags to insane levels, the anime places more of an emphasis on character development, even going so far as to introduce several characters not present in the manga.
It's in this difference that the anime falls shorter on the overall entertainment scale than the manga. There's only so much that audiences can take of the whole "Will Keitaro get into Tokyo University? And who's going to be his one true love?" setup as it drags on and on before they get bored, after all.
The manga's gag focus keeps the pace brisk and wildly unpredictable, driving readers to want to learn what antics Keitaro and the girls will get into next. In contrast, the anime's deliberate character-driven approach makes the story seem longer than it already is.
Sometimes this works, as in an early episode where Shinobu's family background is fleshed out more than in the manga. But most of the time, the spotlight shines a bit too brightly on background characters that deserve to stay in the background, like the single-note Kaolla.
The stories that suffer the most in the transition from print to motion, though, are the stories that were adapted for the "Love Hina" movies "Spring Special" and "Love Hina Again." Many of the humorous sequences that made the printed stories so enjoyable are either toned down or trimmed entirely. The third movie, "Christmas Special," is the only one that escapes scrutiny, with its sweet tale of holiday love.
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