Nora

Nora is about a girl named Nora who meets a professor on a flight to a vacation resort in space. But as they start hanging out in (space)town they notice an inordinate amount of electrical appliances, machines, etc. malfunctioning. It turns out another professor has decided to do a sick prank on mankind using a supercomputer, but the supercomputer decides to take things too far and attempts to wipe out all mankind, including the bad professor. Not cool. So the the professor and Nora, who were already trying to find the cause of all the malfunctioning, decide to try and stop the supercomputer with the aid of the bad professor.

What you'll immediately notice when watching this OVA is that it looks like it's from a tv anime, despite being an 80s OVA. The art clearly hasn't aged well and I don't think there was a single shot of animation in the OVA that impressed me. Despite that, it managed to have one single element that was consistently nice to look at: the main character Nora. And as far as I'm concerned, she steals the show the entire way through.

The titular character Nora is an air-headed, happy go lucky girl, who, after seeing the professor who's sitting next to her on the space ship on tv, decides to hang out with him for the rest of the day. She enjoys the little things in life with a sense of childlike joy and is described by the two professors as a mathematically perfect generator of randomness. She's adorable and a ton of fun to watch. She's the type of girl who would try to prevent a supercomputer from wiping out mankind, by talking to it about its feelings. Hypothetically speaking of course...

This OVA overall was a pleasant surprise and kept my attention all the way through with fun moment after fun moment. Nothing about it impressed me too highly, but it's a fine watch if you just need something to fill 50 minutes worth of time. There is also a sequel to this anime, which seems to have a reputation for being an absolute train-wreck. I've never had any problems with trains, (except that one time as a kid I puked in one and my grandma had to clean me up. Oh, and that other time I threw up in one after eating too much and you could clearly see what I had eaten that evening), but I guess I'll scrap myself for when I get to that OVA.

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Quick take: Nora is known for her sequel Twinkle Nora, one of the worst animes of all time. However, the OG movie is worth a bit of your time as it's not entirely bad.

The star of the show is Nora. That is to say, her character is the best developed and she was drawn with the most precision. There are plenty of laughs to be had over the occasional bad voice acting (yay!), but the vast majority of the time even her voice acting was well done. Let's be clear, you're watching this show for Nora, not for anything else.

The storyline is rather bizarre when it comes to the ending, but for the bulk of the movie, it's actually a rather believable plot, which I appreciated. Most of the accidents are caused by Nora herself as opposed to any other plot device and she seems to have a habit of making things worse. Actually, her ditz, although charming, seems to be out of place. She's agile, she's determined and at the same time, kind of an idiot. Even her clothing choice made me want to see her as a secret agent, but her lack of intelligence seemed to get in the way all the time. If it was meant to be an act on her part, which would explain why she does actually have some good ideas later on in the movie, it was never explicit. Actually, we don't really know anything about Nora save the fact she met the professor on a flight to a Holiday Inn resort.

At the end of the day I would recommend Nora if you had an hour to spare, weren't looking for anything too involved and found Nora to be an attractive anime character. Otherwise, you could skip this one and not fear that you were missing out.

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