Lind Land Reviews: Love Hina

[Lind_L_Tailor]

Love Hina is, as many of you will know, a harem anime from the early '00s. As such, you probably already know exactly what to expect: Comedic misunderstandings, accidental breast-groping, jailbait and all the other clichés.

Difference is, Love Hina can get away with most of this for one simple reason: Half of the clichés it uses are only clichés because everyone copied Love Hina. To have a go at Love Hina for being generic would be like complaining about Led Zeppelin playing generic music... The argument just doesn't hold water. Of course, Love Hina certainly wasn't the first to use all the harem tropes... that would probably be Tenchi Muyo. But it is the show that brought them together in the none-more-imitated format that has spawned countless horrible, horrible anime.

The story of Love Hina is simply this: Ken Akamatsu... sorry, Keitaro Urashima is a student trying to get into Tokyo University, but repeatedly failing. He is starting to fall into a desperate situation, where his parents won't put up with him for much longer... when he receives an invitation to the Hinata Apartments, which his grandmother runs. After the first of hundreds upon hundreds of comedic misunderstandings, Keitaro is informed that the Hinata Apartments are now an Girls Dormitory... of which he is entrusted the task of managing. And thus begins the author's self-insertion fantasy.

Now, obviously, Love Hina is absolutely nothing you haven't seen before. There have been tons of anime that have run with the exact same formula, and odds are that if you've seen more than a handful of anime then you've seen at least one of them. That said, Love Hina is one of the more tolerable examples. For one, it's often funny, which is a lot more than can be said of most imitators. The cast is pretty generic... there's the Tsundere, the lofty, bitchy character, the party animal, the moe jailbait woobie character, and the Cloudcuckoolander. Most of them are still fairly enjoyable despite their genericness, with the exception of the former two, who both have bad habits of beating the living shit out of the protagonist on a whim.

Of course, there's one obvious problem that seriously damages Love Hina, and that would be that it was produced by Studio Xebec. You know, the studio that destroys everything it touches. The studio that turned Akamatsu's later work, Negima, into a pile of animated faeces. The studio that took the Shaman King manga and adapted it into a poorer-quality, child friendly imitation of itself. The studio that... *shudders* ...made Kanokon.

Frankly, a single comparison to the manga will show you all the faults that Love Hina really suffers from. As with Akamatsu's magnum opus Negima, Xebec performed a very poor quality adaptation, losing most of what made Love Hina a great manga. The anime adds tons of pointless extra characters, plot threads, stories and such that weren't in the original manga. While none of these seriously damage it, it certainyl doesn't help it. On top of that, they just don't seem to understand Akamatsu's signature style of humour, nor do they make any attempt to transfer it to the anime.

With all that said, though, the anime doesn't actually suffer all that much for it. I mean, the manga is better, obviously, but... it just doesn't seem to have suffered that much for it. Perhaps it's because, unlike its successor, it didn't have as much substance to fuck up in the first place. On top of that, Production I.G., a much better studio, had a strong hand in the creation as well, so perhaps they exercised some quality control. One way or the other, the adaptation decay isn't that bad. The main problem would've been that they cut off the ending, and went with a filler ending, but they have since then made several OVAs that have covered the rest of the plot.

But back to the point, Love Hina is a simple, fun series. You'll probably get more of a kick from the manga than you would the anime, but nothing worth fretting over.

Final Words: Simple and fun. Badly adapted, but could've been worse.

Animation/Graphics: 5/10
Story/Plot: 5/10
Music/Background: 6/10
Voice Acting: 3/10

Overall: 7/10

For Fans Of: Negima, Tenchi Muyo

[BlackJack]

Good stuff here.

[Dmitri Shostakovich]

I totally agree.

Love Hina was the first manga series I ever read (and one of the only I ever have read all the way through)

It's comedic characters and touching plot line has lead me to re-read it over 12 times (serious understatement)

While the anime adaption was no where near as good as the manga, and some of the voices REALLY didn't match up with how I imagined them, it was pretty entertaining and remains, at least in my opinion, on the must-watch list.

[Jigoku Shōjo]

I haven't watched the anime, and probably won't, but I absolutely loved to manga. It was cute.