Love Hina Christmas Special: Silent Eve

Let's get down with the review.

-This is probably the most well animated episode by Love Hina standard. You can see the excessive frames around the beginning of the episode. But then it stagnates a little bit around the middle but still good.
-This time it's Keitaro who do the sulking when he taught Naru was cheating on him. He also don't get beat around too much.
-Naru confessed her affection to Keitaro on national TV in the end but moments later she's back with her normal abusive attitude towards Keitaro. Okay.

The drama feels better in this episode. If only they kept the drama this good throughout the ... series.

8 months and countless shows since watching Love Hina, I've gotten hold of the specials, and it's review time.

Story

It's Love Hina, and it's christmas time, so we have to have some holiday romance.

The story is nice, especially the end, though I found too much of it to be predictable. Relationships move a bit, but I didn't really gain any new perspective on any of the characters.

Animation/sound

... Not really anything noticably different from the series.

Character

If you've watched the original, then there aren't going to be any surprises here. They're all given an appropriate part in the story, but as I said above, I didn't feel any new depth to the characters.

Enjoyment

Well, personally, I watched the original Love Hina for the comedy, and the romantic comedy, rather than straight romance. However, this extended episode contains little humour, only a few bits worth mentioning, and with the predictability of the story, I was left feeling just a little bored.

Overall

I guess what really matters is what you watched through the original series for. If it was the humour and silliness, then this extended episode won't give you a good fix, and you'll probably be somewhat bored. If it was for the romance, then you'll probably like this extra bit, though it might depend on how predictable you find it.

Short review, certainly, but it's only a short show.

A lot better than the series proper, this holiday movie manages to draw a lot more emotional depth than any of the series episodes tend to. With some real emotional investment, the way it becomes a big throwdown about gifts and affirming love at the end reminded me of the final two episodes of the 'Oh My Goddess!' OVAs which also involves a Yuletide confession of love and gift-giving that had a lot of emotional gravity. Naru become almost likeable in the course of the film, but sadly shows little growth despite the meaningful lessons she received in the Christmas Special, as evidenced in the ... following animation.