Summary: >

Keitaro Urashima was a bonified loser. I mean this guy has had no girlfriend his whole life, he's an accident prone klutz, he's failed to get into Tokyo University 3 times, and his hobby is taking pictures in photo-booths... by himself! Right after failing the exams for the third time, Keitaro decides to pay his grandmother a visit. To make a long explanation short, his grandmother wasn't there and turned the former inn into a girls dormitory - which he somehow ends up running.

Each girl has her own quirks but Keitaro ends up taking a liking to Narugasawa Naru especially - who is probably the most prone to kicking his ass every 10 minutes or so. Keitaro has been searching for a girl he promised to enter Tokyo University when he was a child, and it seems more and more that Naru just might be that girl. But will Keitaro survive being the dormitory manager long enough?

Thoughts: >

Love Hina is a title where the harem anime concept had been distilled down to a formula. At the time of release this idea wasn't nearly as tired as it is now when Japan is still churning out this stuff over a decade later. While quite popular for its time, most anime fans who haven't seen this title will probably not see any reason to go back to it. Love Hina also happens to be one of my favorite manga titles, and therefore I'm pretty critical of this anime. Some of the problems are due to not being transposeable from comic book form, but aside from that I think the anime missed a lot of what made Love Hina good.

Getting some of the more mundane details out of the way, the animation was ok, nothing spectacular but lets face it, these are people typically lounging around a dormitory. Really I didn't like where the artwork went with any of the characters. The music was disappointing - especially the intro song by jpop goddess Megumi Hayashibara who you would think would come up with something... a bit better. The background music is also often rather drab in that it sounds like some sort of 80's elevator music.

The story of Love Hina is in fact a decent one, but unfortunately the anime doesn't pick up the most interesting parts of it. The guts of Love Hina are in fact about finding your own way in life, but the anime is mostly a simple romantic comedy. The humor of the title works well... for the first few episodes, but starts to feel more tired as things go on - especially since it repeats the same material which was pretty gimmicky to begin with.

The characters fair pretty well, but also feel a lot like they were drawn from a bag of character templates. Of historical note, Keitaro is in fact an unusual protagonist for his time. At this point nearly all harem anime males could have been identified as blank slate guys who might as well have a question mark in front of their face. Keitaro does have a personality, but more interesting is that he is a genuine loser. The other girls are somewhat typical aside from Naru who is uncommonly violent. Love Hina involves a lot of girls taking varying levels of interest in Keitaro, but this anime eventually ends up a triangle between Otohime, Keitaro and Naru. What's strange is that from the source material Otohime isn't any more prominent than anyone else, and in fact sword slinging Motoko is more a rival to Naru than Otohime (and so much more awesome). That's just the tip of the iceberg on how much this one missed out on characters though.

As a strait up harem title I wouldn't recommend Love Hina as being best of breed, although when it came out this wasn't quite as tired of a concept as it is now. It has an interesting cast, and is lively enough but if you've seen this stuff before, I'd be surprised if this wouldn't bore you by now. The story was pretty "meh", and aside from that more than a few episodes really do feel like filler material. A decent title, but due to unoriginality and overused gimmicks isn't something I'd recommend.