A-Girl

The main thought I had while watching "A-Girl" is that I bet this is someone's favorite show. It's sort of a Minimum Viable Favorite Anime, which got me thinking about what that means. There is not a whole lot to this. Not to imply that there's not much to silent film, but this is a silent film, so it conveys its narrative through pictures and title cards and the music selection. The relationships it depicts are archetypical enough that you could probably understand even without the cards. The character designs look somewhat similar to each other, enough so that it can take a second to ... differentiate secondary characters.

But there's so much emotional imagery compressed within this OVA. And I don't mean that in the "you're supposed to cry here" sort of way; you couldn't even call this story sad. I mean it walks us through an impressive number of different emotions and caters each scene to expressing that feeling and making us share in it. That was impressive and a wonderful approach to animating this story. It felt fresh and unique enough in a way that could make me absolutely understand someone finding this and going "This is my favorite thing ever."

Going into this anime, I expected your usual high school shoujo romance. I was completely wrong and immediately got hit with an experimental silent film. Like, legit. No dialogue, 0 voice acting, and title cards.

I almost gave up on this 6 minutes in due to a negative review, however, I pushed through and realized how charming it is. I wasn't exactly invested in it like I would be in a usual anime... if anything I was invested as if I was watching a music video with a good story. Which it actually could be categorized as. It reminds me of VIDEOCLUB's Amour Plastique.

Not everyone's ... going to like this but if you like cute and quirky romantic media, I would recommend this. It's an experience.

This was just meant to be a quick OVA to throw on in the background, as I knew it was supposed to eschew dialogue—not quite. A-Girl utilizes title cards in the same way a silent film would, but it has much quicker pacing and often a more natural usage of the device—especially used to great effect during the walking sequence without cuts, where the characters have text near their heads.

If silent films tended to use the device so quickly and naturally, they would have aged better. The direction is solid and some of the chosen imagery and editing borders on the experimental—or perhaps you ... can say it already is because of the short story told via music video format and the aforementioned title cards. There IS actually one scene of spoken dialogue that is supposed to provide contrast in the same way you'd get from Pokemon's Brock opening his eyes for once in his lifetime.

As for the story, it's a sickeningly sweet shoujo that's entirely superficial in its telling of a story far too simple to tell by any means other than the gimmicky manner in which it was told. Without the subtitles, it's almost so universal a story and so tropey in its exploration of a back and forth relationship as to not need explication at all. The pop is passable, but I'd definitely pass on it. It fits the scenes well enough—some of it is awful, while other tracks are mediocre.

The aesthetic is peak moe, but you also have the male model pretty boy who—sometime in-between getting his nails manicured—tries to act so hardcore when he's like "IT'S NOTHIN'" after he simped-out in a fight with some punk and got a badass scar on his face to prevent him from looking like the world's biggest metrosexual wuss who accidentally walked into a shoujo instead of a yaoi.

I mean, what's the difference? Often the same authors, and in many cases the same demographics are targeted, just different wish fulfillment and shipping. It's ultimately some fetishy lovey-dovey thing rather than anything close to art. Anyway, I'm sure the mangaka was happy with this OVA, as were the fans—as it seems like a nice tribute to the manga, from what I can understand—I'm simply not the audience this was intended for, even with the alluded to experimental nature.

Not everything goes well, and there's some added conflict, of course: the "sad" part is supposed to be the male being a playboy who two-times our little moelita, yet she continues to see him, and guess what? True to form, he does it again. Play with a player and get played. That's like being sad when a wolf eats a sheep, which should only be sad for you if it's YOUR sheep (or it wasn't your sheep and you were planning to eat that sheep...). What I find actually sad is that this short is like a high-fructose corn syrup IV drip, and I've needed kidney dialysis ever since I watched it, which was only like... 10 minutes ago.