Anime Meta-Review
Maris the Chojo
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Title Info
- alias: Supergal
- seen: 1 of 1
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- people: Takahashi
- Other elements of this title:
- This title has been commercially released in Australia.
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
Yet another anime version of a Rumiko Takahashi short story. This story is from volume one of the Viz translations of the `rumic world' series of short stories. The short story is good, and this is a solid manga adaption of it. The story concerns a female, the aforementioned maris, who struggles under a terrible impairment, a veritable handicap, that being enormous physical strength. Still, she must rise above her problems in her role as a special police woman for the galaxy's most poorly funded organisation, the space patrol.
At this point you might be wondering how super strength is an impairment, but this anime does a good job (better than the manga) of pointing out what it means. The anime and manga quote six times human strength, but six orders of magnitude sounds more likely. As a result every physical object in the world seems incredibly fragile. Maris is forced to wear a strength restraining cast to stop even the slightest actions causing destruction, and is endlessly in debt in order to pay for the damage she (and her family) unwillingly cause. This basis allows for some suprisingly touching scenes, as well as some high power violence when maris is allowed to remove her cast and work off some frustration. Coupled with this is some nice dialog with her partner, a simple but fairly cool plot and an interesting universe to wander round in. It is obvious that the creators had to be a bit inventive in extending the manga, but they did a reasonable job and succeeded in giving more depth. Indeed it is interesting to contemplate a longer series in which the character is more fully explored. There was one picture, of her in school girl uniform looking strange due to having the power-reduction cast underneath, that really made you wonder what her life had been like. Of course, it doesn't hurt that she grew up into a typical RT female, strong-willed and agressively physical and thus fun to watch as she wreaks havoc.
Unfortunately the animation is at the historical level, looking really dated. This effects some of the action animation, especially for complex objects like spaceships, and reduces a lot of the power. In addition some of the character motion looks very strange. The physical action, including a suprisingly brutal wrestling match at the end, is better than might be expected. Still, it really feels like the creators enjoyed doing this, leading to it still being very watchable. Of course RT stories are character driven, and the scenes, dialog and personalities still work well. There are some other nice touches, including Urusei Yatsura characters in the background and really hilarious animated out-takes during the credits. This is perhaps the best adaption from Rumic World, and still a good bit of fun. Note that this was released as Maris the wondergirl in Australia.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:21 WST 2009