Back in my early days of anime fandom where I was reading fanzines and trading purple tapes with fans around the country, one of the things that was easier to get into as a fan was an OVA series. They’re shorter, could often fit on one VHS tape, and you got a largely complete story, of sorts. One of the early ones I got into which made a lasting impression was Video Girl Ai. The series was based on the manga by Masakazu Katsura, who is still involved in a lot of projects these days, which wrapped up just as the anime adaptation was getting done. It launched in 1989 and finished in 1992 with fifteen titles after being serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump. With the six-episode adaptation done by I.G. Tatsunoko, it’s the kind of work that has left me hopeful for a fuller adaptation in the modern era, especially since I’ve long found Katsura’s character designs to be hauntingly beautiful and fascinating.
The property has been fairly enduring overall as well. While it had a novel out not long after the anime finished, the last few years have seen a revival as well with a pair of live-action TV series on TV Tokyo. I wasn’t able to catch most of it but it worked an interesting twenty-five years later storyline focusing on the nephew of the main character. I had really hoped at the time that it would do well enough to generate a new anime adaptation and I’m kind of still holding out for that, or for Katsura to come back to it and approach it from a new and modern angle in an interesting way. That’s one of the things about the property that I like is that it can be easily updated for modern technology easily enough and, in Japan these days, as the idea of someone to provide comfort and listening is even more important now more than ever.
The premises focuses on Youta, a high school boy who’s madly in love with fellow classmate Moemi. He’s something of an introvert and can’t really express his feelings to her, something that we see with some of the flashbacks that show the recent attempts, such as when he and Moemi talking in the park and she reveals that she’s really in love with Youta’s best friend, the hottest guy in school, Takashi. Takashi, better known as He With Devil Hair, is desired by about all the women in the school, but for his own undisclosed reasons, he plays it cool and doesn’t date anyone. You can see just how much this impacts Youta but that he still pulls himself together enough to try and help Moemi get what she wants. As much as he’s smitten by her and has feelings, he’s in that mold of character that will do what he can to help her achieve her dreams even if it harms him.
Youta’s love of Moemi is strong enough that it’s noticed by some powers that be as on his way home he comes across a video store that never was there before. Upon entering the empty store, the elderly employee tells him he’s the third customer they’ve had. Youta picks up a Video Girl tape, which really does exist in Japan. The cover features the attractive Ai, and he takes it home to play. Ai appears on the screen and talks of how sad he is and how good of a person he is. She realizes his need is strong so she’ll help him and then proceeds to come out of the TV screen and into Youta’s bedroom.
This would have worked perfectly if not for the fact that Youta’s VCR is breaking. Instead of the nice, pleasant, and helpful Video Girl he saw on the screen, he ends up with something wildly different. Ai’s all of those at times, but she’s also rude, forceful, and domineering. Her personality is completely out of balance due to the VCR problems. She also ends up with smaller breasts and wicked sense of humor. After convincing Youta that she’s becoming less feminine, he pulls his hand to her crotch saying that she’s got male parts now. The image of Youta with his hand on her crotch and her holding it there and him realizing she lied is priceless. Especially her follow-up trademarked “tee hee”.
It’s this risque humor tied to a really touching romantic story between Youta and Moemi that makes this series work so well. Youta and Moemi make an interesting pair and watching them play against the growing feelings between Youta and Ai as well as the involvement of Takashi takes the typical triangle and expands it, but makes things rather open ended in how it could go. The characters aren’t fleshed out terribly deeply here since it’s such a short OVA series, but they’ve done things in a way that gives them what they need and makes it clear there are lives above and beyond what we see, which is a fairly rare thing.
One of the things that this series did exceptionally well in my mind is the music. Tohru Okuda handled that department with a score that works really well, though he doesn’t have an extensive anime career of it. His work included things like the Time of Eve project and working on the SD Gundam OVA series for a bit. The score is hugely evocative throughout this series and really sells the feelings and emotions of the characters wonderfully so. The vocal performances are also some of the more memorable ones for me with Noriko Sakai’s opening theme song here and the various insert songs, which featured some solid talents like Maki Kimura, Mayumi Sudo, and Nav Katze. Those moments within with the insert songs really do a wonderful job in expanding on the score and upping our own emotional involvement in the scenes.
Some of what makes this OVA series work for me is easily nostalgia and some slight rose-colored lenses. I’ve revisited it many times over the years and some aspects surely aren’t as “good” as they should be in terms of character interactions, but the reality is that a lot of it is fairly realistic and life itself is messy, hard, emotional, and tear-filled. But the show also brings out so much joy and happiness and discovery that as time goes on we realize what we want isn’t what we really need and that we can find what it is that we truly need in unexpected places and ways. This show has a real magic and charm about it while at the same time being an adorably fun little dirty piece of work with a foul-mouthed video girl that really does want to comfort you when she sees that you’re sad. The show holds up thirty years later in a lot of ways in my mind, though the animation is certainly dated and the whole pre-internet aspect isn’t going to click for a lot of people. But it also reminds of a simpler time, in a way, and how events unfolded an age ago very different. I’ll always recommend it, even with a few caveats, and that’s not changing anytime soon.
