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Forum - View topic30 Years of Kimagure Orange Road
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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My opinion of KOR can be summed up thusly:
Hikaru did nothing wrong! |
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andyos
ANN Associate Editor
Posts: 269 |
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So Summer's Beginning is 'almost universally denounced by even the most die-hard KOR fans'? Well, if I can chip away at that denunciation a bit, I remember really liking it - as an epilogue or postscript to the series, certainly, but valid as such, with some very sweet scenes (including the, ahem, intimate bit at the end).
That said, it's been about 15 years since I watched it... |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 861 Location: PA |
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I've never actually seen all of this series..
I remember catching parts here and there via VHS Fansubs.. then more of it when I was in college. Never left a strong impression on me.. may need to watch it fully. |
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Chocoreto
Posts: 105 |
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Is there a particular reason why this looks and feels so much like something Rumiko Takahashi (Inuyasha, Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku etc) would have written?
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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White Album 2 is effectively a condensed version of it if you don't feel like watching 45 episodes of "I like Madoka, but I'm too much of a pussy to tell Hikaru." |
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AyanamiRei
 Posts: 87 |
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It's interesting to read others peoplabout Hikaru/Kyôsuke . I always saw that as keeping a low risk assurance in case Ayukawa ended up out of reach. We see him actively trying to recover Hikaru on several occasions where , hadn't he nitervenei, she would have give up on hi
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doubleO7
 Posts: 1074 |
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Aside from the fact that Takahashi and Matsumoto had fairly similar art styles back in the 80's, it's noted at the end of the article that UY, MI, and KOR all shared the same character designer for their anime adaptations. As for the story, and this isn't intended as a knock against any of these series (I'm a big fan of many myself), nearly all of Takahashi's long-running series follow the same basic formula of "perpetually drawn-out, beating-around-the-bush romance for comedic effect", with the actual romance barely going anywhere (except once in a blue moon) until the well has run dry and the series has it's finale in sight. KOR, doesn't drift too far from this formula. With the mega-hit Urusei Yatsura having just ended a few years before and Maison Ikkoku still going strong, "The Takahashi Formula" was fresh in people's minds and certainly had an influence on KOR (and many other rom-coms of the era). |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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As far as the KOR anime goes -- I CAN comment on this because I've seen ALL the anime you listed --, the reason for the similar character designs with UY, MI, and Ranma might be because those shows shared common animation production staff (character designers)? I know MI and the first Ranma 1/2 TV series (18 episodes; Viz bundled the two shows as one 161 episode long series but it was actually two shows spread out over about 2.5 years, 1988/1989 to about 1991) shared the same production team. People do go back and forth between projects. Ranma in the first TV series looks a LOT like Yusaku Godai since he shares a common character designer (and I'm NOT talking about Takahashi per se; I mean the anime production team). It's possible that character designers also worked on KOR or somebody was influenced by his or her style and copied it for the KOR production. It happens! The reason why there's some familiar-looking "Macross" characters in Megazone 23 (the first OVA) and Super Dimension Orguss is because those shows had the same character designer, Haruhiko Mikimoto who drew in that style back then. (And to be frank, I liked his old stuff better than what I've seen of Macross Delta where he came back to work on a newer Macross series...) In the late 1980s, there WERE a number of romantic comedy series running at the same time. Formula tends to get repeated when it really works within a set time frame. They do that with every kind of pop culture media -- music, radio, TV, motion pictures, video games... You'll have a ton of sci-fi shows with teenagers operating Gundam-like robots, harem comedies centered around aliens, or a bunch of shows like EVA or bounty hunters within a few years of each other (Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Trigun). KOR and Maison Ikkoku ran very close in time with each other... KOR was the shorter-length show but had a more rabid fanbase IMHO. (At least that was the sense I got... I bought both shows so it's not like I'm invested in a stupid popularity contest myself!) Neither show was a particularly big hit salewise but there are fans who do want them to be license-rescued and preferrably re-released in remastered high-definition (Blu ray) editions. Not gonna happen anytime soon but then again people have said a LOT of things wouldn't happen which HAVE come to pass. I've seen both KOR and MI... both excellent series. They definitely deserve a bigger audience than what they got in the West but the anime fandom is fickle... I think the shows today in general are NOT very deep and are focused too much on whatever the dumb fad of the week is but that's the nature of things now. |
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Parsifal24
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The only iteration of the franchise I've ever seen is Kimagure Orange Road: I Want To Return To That Day and Hara, Eriko stole the entire movie as Hikaru Hiyama. The insert song "Futashika-na by Kanako" Wada in particularly still cuts a little close for me.
Admittedly I missed out on the other iterations as it was originally released when I was all of one year old and I only caught Kimagure Orange Road: I Want To Return To That Day by renting it from Netflix in the early 2000s. |
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Blackiris_
 Posts: 536 |
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Thanks for this informative article. I've been interested in Kimagure for a while now, but I've yet to watch it (only seen ep. 1 so far). My backlog of retro shows is just too long, but I might get to KOR in a while.
As for the designs, they don't only remind me of Rumiko Takahashi, but even miore of Mitsuru Adachi. But then again, many romance/drama/slice-of-life shows in the 80s and early 90s looked like that. |
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kenshin27
Posts: 1 |
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Wow, has it been 30 years already? Between this & Metallica's Master of Puppets (31 years today), I'm feeling very much the old fart today. KOR was one of my first animes and quite possibly the first romcom. Still have the AnimEigo LD set on my bookshelf to this day. Only to be surpassed on my list of fav romcom by Maison Ikkoku which I watched later. Will always have fond memories of Ayukawa though.
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Chocoreto
Posts: 105 |
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Double07 and GeorgeC, thank you both very much for your explanation!
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3979 |
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Kimagure Orange Road has the distinction of being the first non-mecha/science fiction anime that I ever watched.
To expand on what GeorgeC and double07 said. Orange Road, Maison Ikkoku, and Urusei Yatsura do, indeed, share the same character designer, Akemi Takada. As far as Megazone 23 goes, Haruhiko Mikimoto only designed the character Eve. The rest of the characters were designed by Toshihiro Hirano. The reason for the similar looks between the characters is because both Mikimoto and Hirano worked on Macross with Mikimoto as character desinger and Hirano as a key animator on a few episodes. Also, Mikimoto did not serve as the character desinger for Macross Delta. I think you may be confusing that with Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, which Mikimoto did to the character designs for. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2613 Location: Germany |
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Go Nagai and Kazuo Koike used tsundere charters since the early 70s. Meaning that Kimagure got on the train a decade late. The franchise was lame then and remains lame now. Especially as a romance.
Say what you want about Twilight but it features a relationship that gradually goes though stages. Kimagure is the definition of being too competent to be called bad and too bland to be recommended. 5/10 Just another one of Rumiko´s endless genre (but not really) soap operas, only by a different author. Both share anime character designers though and they put ESP into everything back then. Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga has, a now hopelessly outdated, chapter on that. What is more interesting is that the author proved to be a poster child for being a SJ one-hit-wonder by peaking on day one. Don´t do that. His darling is also weirdly devoid of a reboot. All big 80s hit got one, hm. Edit: The manga is from 1984 and the 1st film is from 1985, so why the current celebration? I also saw that Jason has a quote on Madoka being a genre archetype on the Kimagure wiki. Devilman´s Miki Makimura is a 12 years older character, a more famous one too, but what do i know... |
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DanQ
 Posts: 114 |
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For me, Summer's Beginning was more like reunion. Pleasant, for sure ~_^. |
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