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Mmm. Yesterday was a milestone in my life as an anime fan. Finally, I own a copy of the Please Save My Earth OVA.
Not only is this anime based on my favorite manga, but it's out of print, and all of my previous attempts to order it resulted in failure. I'd despaired of finding a genuine copy with everything intact for a reasonable price, but strangely, cheaper copies have been appearing on amazon marketplace recently. Now, I know there are bootlegs out there, but I can be careful and thorough when it's important, so I read about 9 months worth of good reviews for a seller before I purchased my DVD.
It's was worth the wait.
PSME (anime) adapts the first few volumes of the 21-volume manga pretty skillfully. The early 90s production has rich animation, lovely music by Hajime Mizoguchi (with an end theme by Yoko Kanno!), and, of course, the complex characters and plot of the greatest manga of all time. (Well, I think so.)
Unfortunately, it's only six episodes long. This means we have nearly three hours of fascinating material ... followed by snatches of scenes from later in the manga (that aren't really explained) in lieu of a conclusion. To be fair, it would be impossible to cram everything else from the manga in -- like I said, the manga's 21 volumes long, and the anime could only cover a fraction of that. Those who worked on the anime tried to give some semblance of what happened after; it's not that what they managed was bad, or ruined what good work they had already done. It just ... really makes me wish that the whole manga could be adapted, since they did such a good job on the beginning.
Anyway, so many anime adaptions of good manga fail hard that I can't really be upset when this one is otherwise so good. If it had been a TV series instead of an OVA, the animation would probably be cheap-looking, and they still may not have gotten through the story.
And now that I have the DVD, I will be sure to subject as many of you as I can to it ^_^
(The rest of my life treads from bland to frustrating. I had an absolutely wretched toothache for a while -- this as soon as my earache ended -- but one of my home remedies must have worked, because it has thankfully subsided.)
Not only is this anime based on my favorite manga, but it's out of print, and all of my previous attempts to order it resulted in failure. I'd despaired of finding a genuine copy with everything intact for a reasonable price, but strangely, cheaper copies have been appearing on amazon marketplace recently. Now, I know there are bootlegs out there, but I can be careful and thorough when it's important, so I read about 9 months worth of good reviews for a seller before I purchased my DVD.
It's was worth the wait.
PSME (anime) adapts the first few volumes of the 21-volume manga pretty skillfully. The early 90s production has rich animation, lovely music by Hajime Mizoguchi (with an end theme by Yoko Kanno!), and, of course, the complex characters and plot of the greatest manga of all time. (Well, I think so.)
Unfortunately, it's only six episodes long. This means we have nearly three hours of fascinating material ... followed by snatches of scenes from later in the manga (that aren't really explained) in lieu of a conclusion. To be fair, it would be impossible to cram everything else from the manga in -- like I said, the manga's 21 volumes long, and the anime could only cover a fraction of that. Those who worked on the anime tried to give some semblance of what happened after; it's not that what they managed was bad, or ruined what good work they had already done. It just ... really makes me wish that the whole manga could be adapted, since they did such a good job on the beginning.
Anyway, so many anime adaptions of good manga fail hard that I can't really be upset when this one is otherwise so good. If it had been a TV series instead of an OVA, the animation would probably be cheap-looking, and they still may not have gotten through the story.
And now that I have the DVD, I will be sure to subject as many of you as I can to it ^_^
(The rest of my life treads from bland to frustrating. I had an absolutely wretched toothache for a while -- this as soon as my earache ended -- but one of my home remedies must have worked, because it has thankfully subsided.)
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