Anime Meta-Review
Wedding Peach DX
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Title Info
- seen: 1-4 of 4
- type: OAV
- grade: watchable
- genre: magic_girl
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
This is pretty strange, feeling like a somewhat unnatural extension to a fairly formulaic, but assumedly popular, magical girl anime. In any case the story considers a patron goddess (and a real one too, Aphrodite, the classical greek godess of love) who has enlisted a group of magical girls. Given the normal prediliction in mahou shoujo towards `love' being used to power magical attacks this almost leads to overkill. In any case she recruited the `love angels' and gave them the power to transform into forms that look a lot like themselves in short cut (very short) wedding dresses. They also have a signature power and personality (tied to japanese `flower' folklore) with which to defeat evil. Apparently they won the previous battle and were granted amnesia of their other identities. But now demons threaten the human world, and once again the angels of love must fight for the power of love.
And that gives you the title. Wedding because the symbol for love is a wedding dress, Peach because that's the flower association of the ditzy but heroic leader and DX (for deluxe) because this is the sequel. The fact that the legendary Aphrodite (like most of the greek gods) was a pretty earthy and agressive sexual predator is dropped here in favor of a lot of Christian symbolism. Those who have seen a lot of mahou shoujo (or even just sailor moon) will also see a lot of similar material. The team of attractive young girls with strongly defined personalities, a weird mascot animal, long transformation and attack sequences and naughty demons needing punishment in the `name of love' are all pretty stock. Generally there's also a soft, simple shoujo'ish story to proceed the fairly simple action component. To be honest it's not too bad, but i'm an easy mark for simplistic shoujo with fairly likable characters and I can cope with the rest. At the same time it's very familiar. I also got a strange ambiance off this, as if it was also carefully designed (even more so than normal) to appeal to males well outside the target audience. There's an awful lot of fan service, albeit mostly of the lingering pans over the characters in `cute' or revealing outfits. However, if the elements of mahou shoujo really bug you then this one should leave you screaming in pain, it's really not that subtle.
The animation is interesting. Whether good TV or average OAV it definitely isn't new. There's a lot of attention paid to the characters, and their transforms, suggesting that the creators really enjoyed that bit. However the rest of the world is largely pretty sketchy and the monsters and action, while reasonable, are not strong enough to stand by themselves. The girls can all fly, which does allow for some aerial work, but by an large it is just a sequence of magical attacks. There is also a pretty ugly `filter' put over reality when they fight which is visually unpleasant. The shoujo'ish bits are fine, but then they don't need much in the way of animation. The humor and character interplay, backed up by the voices is good. Opening music is pretty corny but also very catchy. There's also a song break during most of these episodes. Heavy negative points for occasionally assuming that the animation is so cool (it isn't) that we want a sequence repeated three or four times.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:27 WST 2009