Summary: >

Eiri is a guy who works at an antique shop. He's an average college student who is well liked and quite social. But one day he encounters a vision of a young girl trapped in an antique glass. Eiri becomes infatuated with Cossette and spends more and more time alone in the shop communicating with her. Cossette reveals that in order to continue seeing each other, Eiri must accept the soul of her father - the man who also killed her. Eiri thus enters a dark pact with Cossette which has another consequence: he must now also accept the punishments due to her father as well.

Eiri gets more and more embroiled with Cossette and people start to worry about what he's spending so much time doing. It's apparent that there is a dark aura about the shop, and there's been strange happenings. And as for Cossette, does she really love Eiri? Just what are her intentions?

Thoughts: >

Le Portrait de Cossette attempts not to only be a gothic horror, but an encompassing artistic vision. This not only involves, characters and themes, but angles and various "mood shots". Most of these things (mood shots) I felt were simply spurious garbage that didn't need to be there, and didn't seem to be related enough to bother with showing. I'm not joking when I say 90% of OVA 1 was of this sort of stuff. You could literally distill OVA 1 into 5 minutes by removing the junk. Worse still is that this type of thing cuts up scenes to the point where you may see a character for 10 seconds at a time. It's difficult to develop characters normally, but I couldn't even tell characters apart because they never spent time identifying them.

If OVA 1 was bad, then the second was more of the same, but with a bit more story. We see the relationship with Eiri develop farther, as well as more concern about Eiri from those who know him. From outside observation Eiri seems like an idiot for his infatuation with Cossette. Cossette seems cold and I started to hate her callous treatment of Eiri who must suffer simply because "he fell in love with her". Some of the story started to show through, but there was still an overwhelming amount of extra "stuff" inserted everywhere.

And then it was OVA 3. There was an actual story, it made sense and was coherent. Characters actually showed up in scenes long enough to assert themselves. Most intriguing of all is that Eiri develops a brain (and a spine) and we see a bit of humanity in Cossette. Her feelings of regret makes the story come together.

Wow that was a long trip wasn't it? OVA 1 felt like a waste to watch and I hated it, and OVA 2 was similar to the first. The third seemed to redeem so much of that, but by then I felt a grudge at having to sit through so much that I deemed pointless.

I choose not to rate this title for a few reasons. I really hate most of this title so much, I honestly wouldn't feel that bad about giving it my worst rating. At the same time the third installment brought forth a compelling story. I also have to admit that even if I didn't personally like what this title was attempting to do artistically, it takes a LOT of guts to try something this abstract.

Would I recommend Le Portrait de Cossette to others? Tough call, but generally no. This is very much a title with an intended audience, but hard to predict exactly who that would be. More likely than not, anyone outside that audience will hate it. If you asked me if I'd like a title that's very abstract, a gothic horror, based on infatuation of a guy with a girl trapped in a glass... I'd say that sounds great. Yet I obviously didn't enjoy this title much. I think that the chances of not liking this title are high enough to recommend avoiding it.