Tis a fortnight before christmas, for children old and new
And I find myself scrambling for something jolly to review
For quite unlike Santa, christmas pickings can be slight
When you’re looking for an anime for your cold winter night
It’s rare to find an anime with Christmas as its theme
And it’s not just like I can review just one seasonal scene
So instead I turn to ecchi, home of nosebleeds and pantsu
And looking right past Itsudatte, mine eyes found Akamatsu
A distinctive auteur, famous at home and overseas
Known for his sprawling narratives, plus shots of panties
His manga are beloved, the treasure of millions of souls
Finding millions of hearts, and then filling their holes
From AI Love You to Negima’s sequel UQ Holder
It was his second IP that only proved to be bolder
Love Hina was silly, just a fanservice romp
Until the story got going, if you’ll dare take a chomp
The characters were deep and fleshed out and real
Even if the mad boar Naru can be a breaker of the deal
The story was epic, with twists and turns galore
The investment was worth it, it made your heart soar
It might not have been perfect, but it was still legit
And the anime adaptation was a huge piece of shit.
I’ve reviewed that atrocity, but it won’t stay behind me
For it’s December, my calendar gently reminds me
So gather round, friends, in this time that’s most groovy
Because Love Hina had to make a fucking Christmas movie.
Our story begins in the Hinata dorm
Where bizarre silly antics are just kinda the norm
We get some exposition, and a montage or two
And a flashback to some kids talking about Tokyo U
You may think a promise between toddlers and a baby
Is a weird basis for love as adults, in fact it’s damn crazy
But alas, they’ve all grown to be as awkward as ever
And poor Keitaro can neither be called bright nor clever
He feels himself stifled and numb to the world
As he wonders what to say to the worst of his girls
Why is Naru being cold? Are they simply not speaking?
Oh well, it could be worse, he could be due for a beating.
Yet all through the house, amidst all of this tension
Not a creature was stirring, save for two chaos gremlins
As Kaolla and Sara search the house for some gifts
With tape they can cut and lids they can lift
All they want is to take just one innocent peak
Yet they find something juicy they just have to leak
They find a note from Naru, and the word ‘love’ they spy
But that’s all they could see, though it’s not explained why
Nothing was stopping them from reading to completion
But they only read one word for no fucking reason
But I guess without these two idiots we wouldn’t have a plot
Although the plot that we got is a plot that’s best forgot
Keitaro feels depressed so Shinobu breaks the news
Then Keitaro breaks his leg, sending him right back to the blues.
He tells Naru he loves her, so she jumps upon a train
And the story goes off the rails, just like Keitaro off his cane.
You may have noticed the animation... Is honestly not that bad
The movement on-screen is fluid at the points that really add
Xebec must have given this title a little extra money
So at least it could look decent while failing to be funny
The artwork and direction are pretty poor in exchange
But for early 2000’s Xebec, there’s surprisingly little pain
I could push this rhyme much farther, so I hope you don’t feel cheated
But the admin has been really strict and I don’t want this review to be deleted.
So yeah, there used to be this really popular manga called Love Hina, and it was fairly inescapable in the 2000s. I guess it’s fair to say that Ken Akamatsu’s work in general hasn’t really held up well, going into the 2010’s and even less going into the 2020’s, and I can’t say I entirely don’t understand why, but it is really weird having been at the perfect age for Love Hina when it came out, only for nearly Akamatsu’s entire catalogue to be forgotten by time in the here and now. Even UQ Holder, his most recent major work that I’m aware of, was mostly popular with previous Negima fans, and as Negima’s fans begin to fade into the ether, ironically, they’ve kinda been dragging UQ Holder with them before it’s time.
In any case, I reviewed the Love Hina anime a long time ago, back in the days of my old blog, and I don’t feel entirely like revisiting old material, but here’s a quick overview... They scrubbed all of the fanservice away, despite it being a very PG sort of bare-butts-and-nothing-else style of fanservice already, and the material did not stand very well without that cheeky sensibility as its crutch. The animation was a mixed bag, being juggled between one of the best production companies(Production IG) and one of the worst(Xebec), the writing was inane and sloppy, and the story was told completely out of order. They added a lot, but nothing of any value, and the English dub was more miss than hit. The story ended prematurely, at what I’d like to believe THEY thought would only be the halfpoint, and they had to hastily complete their version of the story via several follow-up OVAs.
Each OVA compiled a different part of the later days of the manga into the animated format, but I honestly don’t remember how much of the Christmas OVA was taken from the manga. I don’t know, it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read this series, but I don’t remember any of the direct manga parallels to this OVA. Well, that’s not exactly true, I remember the actual reason Keitaru broke his leg, and it was under completely different circumstances, so maybe this storyline is original? I don’t know, if you’re reading this and you happen to remember how accurate(or not) this special is to the source material, let me know, and because it’s the season of giving, I’ll even pretend to care.
Our story begins in probably the dumbest way humanly possible. Following the parts I detailed in my poem, this series of completely idiotic misunderstanding starts to breed, creating more misunderstandings, until you have a story about Kaitaro and Naru looking for each other all over Tokyo, with more and more idiotic misunderstandings and laughably random encounters keeping them just shy of connecting.
Oh, and if that plot sounds like you’d have to stretch it really thin to reach the 45 minute time stamp, it gets stretched even thinner to accommodate the rest of the cast who also have to be involved. Remember the Teen Titans movie Trouble in Tokyo, where only one storyline actually mattered, so the rest of the cast were each given some stupid bullshit to keep them occupied? This special pretty much does the exact same thing. Kitsune and Shinobu have to make money to get home. Motoko gets groped and gets arrested for hitting the guy. Mutsumi teleports wherever she needs to to spout off cryptic bullshit about the childhood promise. Motoo then runs into some friends who invite her to a party, and to my delight, she actually nopes the fuck out of this melodramatic clusterfuck to go with them... Only to unfortunately rejoin the main gang later.
Remember in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, how in the first few seasons they never felt the need to cram the entire cast into every single story, and sometimes you’d only get half the cast for an entire episode and everyone was cool with it because it meant the writers didn’t need to force any contrived reason for a character to be where they weren’t needed? That was a good show. I should be watching that instead.
The only explanation I can think of for why this OVA is written the way it is would be because it’s supposed to be an homage to the way Keitaro and Naru’s romantic development was paced, with so many cruel coincidences and misunderstandings keeping them apart that it sometimes felt like they were battling fate itself to be together, and even though nobody really liked them as a couple, the challenges they overcame still felt really powerful and engaging. I get the feeling this OVA was made to try and recapture that, but it really doesn’t come across anywhere near as well, especially with the extremely underwhelming note that it ends on.
Also, Ken Akamatsu is a character in this. Yep. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth hours of this 45 minute special, Ken Akamatsu encounters Kitsune and Shinobu looking for a way home, so he hires them to help sell copies of the Love Hina manga to people. I’m serious. I’m not making this shit up. He and Shinobu even already knew each other beforehand.
Let’s see, what else... I’ll say some positive stuff, I guess, just for the sake of the Holiday? Some of the actors did a good job, including Bridget Hoffman as Shinobu, Derek Stephen Prince as Keitaro, Steve Blum as a random cameo policeman, and yes, even Dorothy Fahn as Naru was okay once in a while. Naru’s ultimate solution for finding and kinda confessing/not confessing to Keitaro was a legitimately nice scene.
Over-all, though, I don’t know who to recommend this too. If you go in blind, you’ll be confused as fuck, and have no idea what’s going on, as this OVA is not beginner friendly. Having said that, if you’ve previously seen the series, you COULD watch it for completionist purposes, but that would also mean watching MORE of the Love Hina anime, and nobody wants that. My best bet would be, if you have friends you like to get together with to drink and watch bad movies, this is a pretty good title to suggest for that. Take a drink every time Naru is violent, or Keitaro gets hurt, or the fake accents that the actors playing Kaolla and Kitsune are using make you want to strangle a turtle.
I give Love Hina Christmas Special a 2/10.
