Anime even your girlfriend will like.

Review

Kare Kano's one of the few anime shows that is easy to recommend to friends. You could recommend Evangelion, but then you'd have to explain the fact that there's 26 episodes, a movie that sums up those episodes and adds some more story, and then another movie that replaces the last two episodes of the anime. Oh, and then you have to explain who NERV, Seele, and Adam are when you're not exactly sure yourself.

The title translates literally as, "his and her circumstances." Fans started calling it Kare Kano (the Japanese love to shorten long titles, a habit which the title of FLCL plays off of) and the name stuck. The "him" and "her" in question are Yukino and Arima, the two best students in school (how very, very Japanese), who compete at first as rivals and eventually fall in love.

Even with its faults (low production values, the lesser second half of the series) Kare Kano is the greatest shoujo ever made-- a hilarious love story bursting with energy and tempered by a maturity rarely found in anime. The first four episodes, especially, are Hideaki Anno in his directing prime.

The second half: the money runs out

Since the manga was still running, Hideaki Anno originally wanted to write an original ending for the Kare Kano anime, but it's rumored that the show's sponsors, TV Tokyo (perhaps fearful of an Evangelion-style psycho-sexual apocalypse of an ending), insisted Gainax stick to the manga script. What a shame! In any case, by the end of the show, it's clear that Gainax was running out of money, as usual. There's a dramatic difference between the show's first half (up to episode 14) and the rest. The animation is cheaply done, with little animated movement and a heavy use of live-action elements and stills from previous episodes. There is an endless amount of recapping throughout, not to mention a full episode and a half (14-15) of "the story so far"!

Some of this cheapness led to some interesting experimentation, however. Episode 19 is animated using paper cut-outs of characters being moved around with sticks! Large chunks of the final episode are told in a set of slightly animated or moving set of manga panels, copied panel for panel, line for line from the manga. The only addition is a narrator who interjects things like, "He answers," and "Questions." It sounds kind of stupid, but actually serves to take the focus less off Tonami and Sakura and present love in a more universal, abstract way, a story told a thousand times before.

Fans of the anime who want to know how the story continues can pick up the Kare Kano manga beginning with volume 8.

The End Sequences

The next episode previews feature the voice actresses of the Miyazawa sisters in the recording studio. After episode 15 you only hear their voices over images. Many of the episodes' ending credits contain live-action footage, probably shot by Anno as he was gearing up to pursue live action filmmaking. These mostly feature the insides of high schools shot in experimental ways. Highlights include:

Links

Official Page (English) - back from when Gainax still maintained its pages in English. Filled with good content.

AME: Kare Kano - the best Kare Kano fansite. Series info, character profiles, soundtrack tracklisting, cd booklet scans, image gallery, the works.

Right Stuff - official US Kare Kano DVDs. The Right Stuff producer of the show has a journal here.

Geneon - official US Kare Kano soundtracks

Please listen to me, Anno! - a fascinating series of interviews Hideaki Anno conducted with high school students around Japan to prepare for making Kare Kano. My guess is that he was looking for insight and inspiration back before his plans for an original Kare Kano ending were scrapped.

Episode Guide - at fansite Raging Otaki, lists the staff for each episode

Wonderland Kare Kano (French & English) - fansite with Kare Kano laserdisc cover scans

Tokyopop - official publisher of Kare Kano manga in English

Monthly Lala (Japanese) - magazine that serializes Kare Kano

Down with Arima - fansite written in English-as-a-second-language but filled with Kare Kano trivia and tidbits