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Elf Princess Rane
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Title Info
- alias: Yousei hime Rein
- seen: 1-2 of 2
- type: OAV
- grade: worthy
- people: Daichi
- genre: dumb_fun
- made: 1995
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
When I first saw this title I didn't know what was happening. Now I think I understand it a bit better, along with its strengths and weaknesses. The first thing to mention is that this anime is largely a vehicle for manic and hyperactive action and humor. The story is fitting, following the adventures of `Go' a sort of young, crazed, hyper-adrenal, Indiana Jones adventurer type of guy. One of his latest schemes has resulted in the appearance of a small (5") flying elf, which he takes as clear evidence of a mystery to unravel. Of course what he mostly ends up unravelling is the cities plan to turn itself into an immense fun-park, as he manages to mis-identify everything as part of his `quest' shortly before accidentally destroying it.
Of course the foundation plot is only a small part. To start with there are lots of other characters, including a somewhat evil elf, Go's long suffering girl friend and a profusion of his sisters who appear to run various parts of the city. And this still isn't more than half of what goes on. Add to that lots of dialog, visual jokes, verbal jokes, insane action and finally put 10,000 volts through it and you're almost getting there. This anime is partly a parody, but mostly just an exercise in how much energy and humor could be packed into an OAV episode. The sheer energy and inventiveness of this title has to be seen to be believed. Of course there are problems with this approach, the energy level reduces the depth of the anime and the complexity of the story. This combines with the small number of episodes to limit its power and development. In addition some of the humor involves playing with words, which has strange results for the subtitle.
The production is certainly competent. At times it seems fairly simple, but the mastery of visual expressiveness, and interesting framing and setting for the scene results in some very novel animation. The visual design, world design and character design is all interesting and well suited to the character being represented. The action scenes are good and the voices, while manic, are also excellent. Whether they could keep this energy up over a longer episode count seems to be a question that will, sadly, never be answered. Of course since this was a testbed for Child's Toy, which shows a lot of the same sense of style, perhaps it has been.
Those people at THEM love it, calling it the "cleverest, zaniest comedy to come out of Japan" in this review. The Anime Critic felt much the same way, calling this `nuts' in this review and congratulating the dub actors. Both Lord Carnage and herself the elf loved it, saying it "has way too much fun messing with your brain" in this somewhat minimal review.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:17 WST 2009