The Essentials
Name: Love Hina
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Episodes: 25, plus two specials (Christmas and Spring)
Released: April 19, 2000 - September 27, 2000 (TV), December 25, 2000 (Christmas Special), April 1, 2001 (Spring Special)
Based On: Love Hina manga by Ken Akamatsu
Director: Yoshiaki Iwasaki
Produced By: XEBEC, Production I.G
US Distribution By: Bandai Entertainment
Major Japanese Cast
Naru Narusegawa: Yui Horie
Keitarou Urashima: Yuji Ueda
Mitsune Konno: Junko Noda
Shinobu Maehara: Masayo Kurata
Kaolla Su: Reiko Takagi
Motoko Aoyama: Yuu Asakawa
Haruka Urashima: Megumi Hayashibara
Mutsumi Otohime: Satsuki Yukino
Noriyasu Seta: Yasunori Matsumoto
Sarah McDougal: Yumiko Kobayashi
Major English Cast
Naru Narusegawa: Dorothy Melendrez
Keitarou Urashima: David Umansky
Mitsune Konno: Barbara Goodson
Shinobu Maehara: Ellen Arden
Kaolla Su: Wendee Lee
Motoko Aoyama: Mona Marshall
Haruka Urashima: Jane Alan
Mutsumi Otohime: Jean Howard
Noriyasu Seta: Ron Allen
Sarah McDougal: Julie Maddalena
Scores
Animation: 7/10 (x 4 = 28 pts)
Story: 6/10 (x 4 = 24 pts)
Music: 7/10 (x 4 = 28 pts)
Coherence/Story Arc: 5/10 (x 2 = 10 pts)
English Dubs: 4/10 (x 1 = 4 pts)
Gut Score: 6/10 (x 5 = 30 pts)
Total: 124/200 (62%)
Review
Love Hina is about a boy, Keitarou, who is studying to take the entrance exams for Tokyo University for the 3rd time. He’s trying to get into Tokyo U. because of a promise he made to a girl when he was little. The only problem is that he can’t remember who the girl is. Suddenly, his grandmother decides to travel around the world and taps Keitarou to run her Hinata Inn. However, the Hinata Inn is now an all-girls dorm and now Keitarou must deal with the harassment of the dorm’s female’s residents as they have to do with having a male manager and the fact that they’ll have to move out if Keitarou doesn’t become the new manager. However, Keitarou starts to wonder if one of the girl residents of the dorm is the girl he made the promise to when he was young.
For me, Love Hina can best be described as one of the biggest piles of wasted film, time, money, DVDs, and DVD boxes that has ever come out of the medium of anime. It is a series that impresses on virtually no level, and disappoints on many.
For example, the story line of who the girl that Keitarou made the promise to is brought up several times during the series, but it is often more of a side-story than front-and-center. Most of the story revolves around the dysfunctional relationship between Keitarou and one of the tenants, Naru, and how many times Keitarou can stupidly walk into the female’s bath or some other compromising situation which ultimately results in him being punched 2 miles away by Naru or being attacked by Motoko with a sword, and/or various other assaults.
While some of the episodes, especially episodes 21-24, actually have some coherence to them, the episodes are largely independent of each other. While the two specials kind of wrapped things up, they seemed to be basically be the same story from the series just slapped into a new situation. The animation could have been better considering that this series was the first done entirely digitally. The music largely sounds like cheap keyboard music (and this is 2000!) and the English dubs are barely tolerable - maybe, with a few characters with decent dub voices, but most with bad to terrible dubs.
Love Hina may be popular in some circles for the very reason that it’s a zany, random love comedy, but I didn’t find the humor all that funny, and it seemed so random and over-the-top that I found it more on the stupid side rather than humorous. If one is into truly random harem romance comedies, you may be into Love Hina. However, this is a series that can easily and safely be passed on by most anime fans.
First Watched: November 2005 - December 2005
Do I Own: No
Do I Recommend: No
