Love Hina, Vol. 4: Love Hurts (2000)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Yoshiaki Iwasaki
Cinematography by Katsutoshi Hirose and Fumio Hirokawa
Original Story by Ken Akamatsu
Character Design by Makoto Uno
Art Direction by Hachidai Takayama
Lyrics and Music by Ritsuko Okazaki

Features:

• Keitaro’s Sketchbook
  
• The Making of Love Hina featurette
  
• English and Japanese audio
  
• English subtitles
  

Dindrane's Anime Warnings:

• Girls kissing just everything and everyone
• Another generation ruined by a gold bikini
• Bad Southern accent

Rating: 13+

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Buy it.

Love Hina continues with another collection of four episodes. In “The First Kiss Tastes Like Lemon? Marshmallow?” Kaolla Su, Shinobu, and Shinobu’s friend all play with the idea of first kisses. Their silliness and questioning soon expands to engulf the older residents as well, and more than one resident has to confront their own first kisses. Then, in “Naru’s Crush is Now a Tokyo U Professor,” Kitsune scrambles to keep Naru from reuniting with her former tutor and crush while all the residents have to work to make up the rent money. In “I Love You! Romantic Confession Inside a Cave,” Keitaro takes matters into his own hands and tries to help Naru with what he thinks is her crush. Finally, “Monkey Performance at the Seaside Teahouse Hinata” has the gang putting on a play called “Journey to the West” in order to raise more money; between the puppets, monkey and pig spirits, a controlling benefactor, and Keitaro’s friends as the horse, things don’t quite go as planned.

In Love Hurts, the plots evolve to highlight individual characters and their pasts. In the last disc, we learned more about Kaolla, Motoko, and Shinobu, and with this disc, we see much more about Naru, her past, and her decisions. Overall, these episodes are just plain hysterical. The last episode particularly is funny combining a costume for Naru worthy of Princess Leia, the clueless archeologist as the Evil Bull King, Keitaro as the “hero,” and so on. Nothing ever turns out quite as they plan, but this is a wonderful way to keep things interesting and entertaining for we viewers.

The characters in general continue to interest and amuse us. There is, however, an exception in the introduction of a highly irritating and thus far pointless new character: Sarah, the professor’s daughter. She’s loud, exceedingly bratty, and violent, and she also has everyone snowed about how innocent she is. The viewers then are left with scene after scene of her gratuitously breaking things and blaming Keitaro (and of course they believe her, not him). Hopefully, now that Naru has caught Sarah once, this will taper off if Sarah stays in the show.

The features on this disc are engaging: we have an installment of “Keitaro’s Sketchbook,” which shows several nifty character sketches and images, and we also have a lengthy featurette, The Making of Love Hina. The featurette is rather fun and a wonderful way to peak a fan’s interest in the show--definitely worth watching. If you only have a couple features on your disc, they should be good ones, as these are.

The audio and video were both on par with the previous discs in this series: quite solid. The colors were crisp and clear, bold or subtle as called for. The characters are clearly legible, even in scenes with music, and the voice actors do a great job conveying emotion, mood, and personality. Even Kitsune’s inexplicable and Hollywoodized Southern accent might grow on me, as her sweet-talking personality shows more subtle cunning and seems to match the stereotype of “Southern Belle” (which I deny, but that’s neither here nor there). Aside from this, I definitely want to hear more of Ritsuko Okazaki’s music work.

This disc of Love Hina might just win over any fans who have been waffling about loving it or not. Like Ranma 1/2, this series does a great job of combining silliness with martial arts action or romance with comedy.