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: >

Well the first thing to get out of the way is that this will be a poor quality review - mainly due to the overwhelming bias I have, having read the entire manga series. You see the manga is my favorite comic of all time PERIOD. It starts out slow at first and keeps building on the genius of Ken Akamatsu's imagination. It's really THAT good. So how could any anime possibly live up to that? Well in my opinion it can't, thus the warning about this review...

So lets take this down piece by piece. The animation was okay, 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.

So what about the story. At first everything starts out pretty decent. It's a funny show, that's quirky and energetic - with a lively plot. Then as things drag on a lot of the attributes of Love Hina start to seem really like gimmicks that get old. The plots go from energetic to weird and just down right spastic with little coherency at times. Overall the story tended to have more good points than bad. I guess I would have to grade Love Hina as average. It's a weird balance between good points on one side balancing the bad points on the other. In closing I just can't give any advice on seeing this series due to the fact that it's basically in the middle of see or don't see. If you have some cash to spare, then give it a shot - that's about all I'll say.

So how is it that I can like the manga so much but dislike the anime when they're based off of the same concepts? I guess I would say that some things just don't come across very well in anime form. For instance Naru's abuse of Keitaro. Many argue that the slapstick gets old in the anime, which it certainly does, but in the manga it's more of a feature. Typically it goes by sequence of Keitaro's action -> Naru's abusive reaction -> keitaro's recovery. Note that this takes up only 3 comic frames, and quite often the other characters have already moved on to other things during the second 2 frames so a lot of it really happens in the background. It's also a sort of inside joke, like how characters all believe Keitaro must have some sort of immortality to survive so much abuse, or the weird side plot hints at how everyone learns kung-fu. Well I could go on and on (and I certainly will on my Love Hina page) but for now, let's leave it at that.

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