Carol

I don't think this anime deserves such a bad rap. Compared to most of the newly released anime, which all feel kind of the same to me, Carol was a nice change of pace. Also, if you like the music from City Hunter, I think you'll like the music in this anime, especially the closing song, since it's made by TM Network (the same guys who sing GET WILD).

As of this posting, this anime is available on Youtube. Just search "CAROL OVA 1990". Your Japanese listening skills have to be up there, though. There weren't any subtitles :/

Hope you like it!

Haha this is so messy it's almost worthwhile. Japanese intuition is intriguing, even with bad examples like these. Here we have the Alice in Wonderland template, dissected and thrown against several unripe narratives, mainly evolving around an "album" that works as a portal to another world, though it's partly causing the music from the first world to disappear, pun is seriously not indented lol, that's how it really is, it's actually written based on a real band and album. The premise is engaging indeed, but it feels like a surreal aesthetic mix of "post-punk" from the 80s and dungeon myths, it's even weirder than that ... if you pay close attention to all the details, plenty of mainstream references too.

To add more to the strangeness, the heroine is named Carol while her mean friend is the one named Alice, though the former has the prototype Alice look, she even meets a rabbit in the other world who helps her. This is the part most fascinating to me, as I follow the evolution of the Alice narrative in general. I like though that they turned around the princess saved by a knight stereotype into the complete opposite, the princess is the one who saves the knight, and finally they join to defeat the monster.

I wouldn't recommend it, unless you’re weird or consuming magic mushrooms while watching.

The music of the world is starting to disappear, even the sounds of the Big Ben are not heard anymore. We start this OVA with a girl named Carol, your decent teenager and pretty much average like anyone else at her age. Her father is a famous classical music composer and he's having problems doing music at the time. Sometimes she hears a voice calling her name but she doesn't know what it is until she is suddenly transported to another world. It happens that some guys there wanted her help to rescue a friend of theirs that was captive at the foes lair and ... then to destroy the huge beast that was consuming all the music in the world and would eventually consume all the sounds of th4e universe.

The premise wasn't that bad, yes, reading the stuff above, makes the imagination travel and think that it may turn into something interesting eventually. There's two ways from here, or we'll have a great oldie watching session with a overall good production or we'll have a old anime crap time. It could have turned out into something memorable or something forgettable, unfortunately it was for the later case. The animation was not the best, could easily been made in '85 without any effort, but there were some major flaws in this title that went beyond the animation field and that pushed it to the land of obscurity. The story had major holes that could have been easily fixed if it had a proper care. Questions like, "Why did they do this?" "Why did they do that" in certain scenes keeps popping out, " why did they show this here?", etc...
The story wraps in a bad way and leaves stuff unexplained and there even were some parts that even though it had it's sort of explanation, you just couldn't understand.
The end of the story reserves no surprise and it is a ultra forced happy ending.

As you can see, this is an OVA of 59 min, it's hard to make a character growth in due time, but they tried to do it here, they failed horribly, so the characters came out being pretty weak, especially the lead role, Carol.

All in all, it was an entertaining watch for the laughs and the WTF moments that weren't' suppose to be WTF moments, especially the "cool sunglasses elf", must be seen to be believed.
It deserves well the honour of "so bad it's good" title.

Rate: 4:5/10