In the heart of Japan stands a prestigious college called Tokyo University. It’s easily the equivalent of any Ivy League school in America, and it carries an odd superstition that if you manage to get accepted alongside the person you love most, the two of you will be together forever. When Keitaro Urashima was a child, he made friends with two little girls on the playground, and he promised one of them that when they grew up, he’d go to Tokyo U with her. Well, they got separated soon after, and Keitaro grew up into a hopeless lovesick loser with no romantic prospects and a dream he had no hope of fulfilling, and the only thing keeping him going was his goal of one day achieving his destiny, reuniting with his childhood love, and attending Tokyo U! Unfortunately his first attempt at enrolling ends in failure, so his parents force him to take over the family dorm(what westerners would call a boarding house) called Hinata Inn. There, he meets several wacky female residents, who all have their own bizarre personalities and backstories.

One of them is Naru Narusegawa, a girl slightly younger than him who is also trying to get into Tokyo U, and while the two do not get off on the right foot... He is constantly getting into misunderstandings and accidents that make him look like a pervert, and she constantly beats the shit out of him for it... They do soften towards each other over time, and it even starts to feel apparent that she might actually be the girl he made the promise to... Unless it was Mutsumi Otohime, another girl on a quest for Tokyo University for similar reasons. They all fail their entrance exams the following year... Keitaro for the second time, Mutsumi and Naru for the first time... And a year after that, when Keitaro fucks up and believes he may have failed his third attempt, he can’t bear the shame anymore, so he runs away to live on a desert island, which is crawling with ancient turtle ruins, and Keitaro is not turtley enough for the turtle club. Can Naru and the rest of Hinata Inn bring him back home before he throws away his future?

Like the rest of the Love Hina anime, the Love Hina Spring Special was animated by Xebec, which is popularly considered one of the worst production companies in the entire anime medium, and for good reason. I’m not going to say everything they’ve produced was terrible, but they put out a ton of duds while they were around, and nothing really impressive to balance the scales. Director Yoshiaki Iwasaki has a slightly more inspiring resume, as he animated a lot of silly, lighthearted children’s fare back in the day, along with dipping his toes into the isekai market more recently, he can do fine with the right budget... And I’m guessing this particular special had the right budget, because it’s probably the best looking entry into the Love Hina anime franchise. Well, okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, because it certainly doesn’t look expensive, but the level of quality in the animation is more or less consistent, characters remain on model throughout, and there are never any jarring drops in quality at noticeable moments.

I’m guessing this is partially because in comparison to the rest of the franchise, this special offers the highest level of opportunity for a director to prove himself, without having to deal with the burden of a lengthy production. At only 45 minutes, it had to be a lot easier to allocate funds than in the much longer TV series or evenin the Love Hina Again OVA, and unlike the Christmas special, this story arc offered a ton of unique locations to visit, and the characters are constantly moving and doing things other than walking around and moping. Obviously this comes at the risk of the pacing of the story, as the cast are frantically jumping from set piece to set piece, but at least things remain visually interesting. The character designs are still mostly generic looking, as the jump from page to screen did not treat very many members of the cast very well, but they finally brought in Nyamo(who looks accurate enough) and we also finally get the famous leaf bikinis, take whatever small miracles you can get.

What hasn’t changed at all is the English dub, which is still one of the most infamously terrible in anime history. To be fair, this show isn’t alone in that problem... Love Hina came out in the early 2000s, when there was a major shift happening in anime dubbing. The way things used to be, companies like DIC and 4Kids would produce dubs for the mainstream television market, censoring the shit out of them in the process, while companies like Geneon and Pioneer would produce dubs for more mature, generalized titles for the home video market, and they would swing more towards accuracy, which unfortunately meant directing their actors to try and match the tone and vocal registers of the original Japanese seiyus. This resulted in a lot of male protagonists with nasally, shaky voices, and female characters with high-pitched, breathier performances that sound completely unnatural, resulting in a headache inducing shrillness that just never sounds right in any context.

Since this was the trend at the time, before studios like Funimation and ADV started to take over the market in the early-mid 2000s with more natural sounding acting, it’s hard to blame this on any of the actors that took part in this mess... Some of whom are still around and doing much better work... but holy crap does it sound dated. Derek Stephen Prince and Dorothy Fahn sound fine as Keitaro and Naru when they dial it back and they aren’t screaming at each other, but they are annoying otherwise. Barbara Goodson’s fake southern accent is just as awful as always, and as much as I love Wendee Lee and Michelle Ruff, their fake Indian accents are just insultingly bad. Bridget Hoffman sounds like an adult trying to soften her voice to imitate a child as Shinobu, which really should not be the goal, and I’m sorry, I know Mona Marshall is really highly respected as a voice actor, but I’ve just never been a fan of her work.

Also they all sing. There’s a song toward the end of the movie, and it got dubbed, so they all get to sing a line or two, and it’s horrendous.

At this point, I’ve reviewed plenty of Ken Akamatsu anime on this site, and my feelings towards them have largely remained the same. I don’t remember exactly what I've said previously, but I don’t want to retread everything again, so here’s just what I feel like saying off the top of my head; Ken Akamatsu is an auteur who tends to write these long, sprawling narratives where he spends a ton of time fleshing out his characters and comedy style before he actually gets to the point. His stories become a lot stronger and more complex over time, which is rewarding for anyone who managed to stick with them, and since those first few volumes might have felt tedious otherwise, he fills them with silly fanservice hijinks and PG level nudity to spice things up and keep your attention. This all makes his work borderline impossible to adapt, because it is not popular enough to get the episode count it needs, and his fanservice is just destined to be censored to hell and back for TV. Also a lot of it has not aged well if we’re being honest.

There’s a reason his debut work, AI Love You, never got an anime. Out of the adaptations that I’ve seen, the only one that really succeeded in telling a full, coherent story was the second Negima series, which managed to stay true to the spirit of his work while abandoning all of its baggage by telling a completely new story, and even that’s not well regarded by fans. Everything else, from Negima’s first anime, to UQ Holder, to Love Hina, was slashed and censored into a bastardized version of the source material, ended prematurely, and had to continue their stories through OVA sequels and spin-offs. I guess the Negima spin-offs turned out okay, but with Love Hina, they’re kind of train wrecks. They each take one or more story arcs from the manga, frankenstein them together into a mish-mash of barely coherent parts, and squeeze them into a bite size OVA run time, and The Spring Special is no exception.

Now, as I’ve said before, the Love Hina story is not fresh in my mind. It’s been over a decade since I’ve read the manga or watched the TV series, so while I am aware that this special is a certified butchering of the source material, I can’t really work up the passion to be mad at it for that. This isn’t going to be the case for everybody, especially for hardcore Love Hina manga fans, but let’s be honest, how many of those are still around? This has, strangely, granted me the opportunity to watch this special through a new lens... That of someone who is vaguely familiar to the franchise, but also separated enough from it to take the special on its own merits. Because of this, I’m hoping to approach the Spring special in a more positive light than I have with any previous Love Hina entry, because I live in the northeast, I just survived multiple heavy snow storms, and if I’m going to watch a spring-themed anime movie about a guy leaving a snow-covered suburban hellscape to escape to a tropical island, I am damn well going to like it.

When you approach the Spring Special from a neutral point of view, with no loyalty based bias towards the manga, but enough basic knowledge to explain what’s happening on a functional level, this special is mostly okay. The story is easy enough to follow, and the female-on-male violence is kept to enough of a minimum that you could easily write it off as just a quirk of the genre, rather than the infuriating cliche that it was in the series proper. If you don’t think about it too hard or ask too many questions, the story flows pretty smoothly. A guy and a girl who are into each other try to get into college together. The guy thinks he failed, so he runs away. The girl runs after him. They get lost, they’re in dire straits, so their friends chase after them. A bunch of silly science fiction nonsense and a constant theme of turtles move the story forward, there’s a little bit of fanservice, it’s your standard anime short. It’s a relatively simple story with a fast-paced plot that somehow makes both sense and no sense and a ton of over-the-top visuals that could only be achieved through animation.

This is the most stereotypical anime movie that you could possibly make. Honestly, if it weren’t attached to any existing franchise, I would recommend it just based on how bizarre and creative it might look to a newcomer. It’s not good, but there would be an admirable level of novelty to it, like Magical Play or Cat Soup. The problem, however, would be three-fold. First, it’s a poor representation of the side cast, with only Kaolla Su and Shinobu Maehara really standing out in any meaningful way. Kitsune, Motoko, Mutsumi, Sarah and a handful of anime exclusive characters(including the mangaka himself who has a pointless cameo) don’t really do anything important or memorable. The second problem is, Shinobu’s entire subplot about being asked out by a boy and working up the nerve to confess to Keitaro is pointless and goes absolutely nowhere. And the third is the ending. I’m not going to spoil anything directly, but the ending sequence is equal parts stupid and lazy, to a degree that wouldn’t be replicated until the 2015 movie Pixels.

What I will say is that the ending sequence kicks off with a completely pointless song, and I don’t just mean that it serves no purpose, oh no, I mean pointless in such a way that the lyrics are completely vapid and have nothing to do with anything that’s going on in the story. The characters are just taking turns singing about friendship and what they mean to each other, it comes out of nowhere and leaves you with your mouth hanging open by the time it wraps up. I’m convinced it was only included to forcibly meet a 45 minute runtime. Look, guys, I tried to be positive. I swear I did. And for at least two thirds of it, I was. I shut my brain off, and just sat there like a breathing asparagus, just enjoying the animation and appreciating that the story moved fast enough to distract me from asking too many logistical questions, like why would Naru and Nyamo have to change into leaf bikinis because their clothes were wet, but Keitaro stays in the same outfit throughout? Why bother having Keitaro fall overboard if he’s gonna wind up exactly where the ship is going anyway? And funny third thing, if they’re not going to try at the end, why should I.

Looking at this special from a new perspective has not dramatically increased my opinion of it, but I think I do have more of a soft spot for it than I used to have. Going back to the visuals, it looks better than the rest of the franchise, even if it’s not by all that much. The story is competent and easy enough to follow up until the third act, even if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’m not usually one to shut off my brain while watching anything, but by forcing myself to do so, I was able to make the experience a lot more pleasant than if I were just sitting here shooting fish in a barrel like my last few Love Hina reviews. Does that make it good? No, not even close, but it is tolerable enough, and I could understand it being someone’s guilty pleasure. It might not melt your heart, but it will provide you with some degree of warmth while you wait for all that fucking snow to melt.

I give Love Hina Spring Special a 4/10