Love Hina-Volume 4: Love Hurts (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Main Menu Audio & Animation Biographies-Character Featurette-Making of Love Hina Trailer-1:40 Trailer-Madman Propaganda DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	86:30 (Case: 100)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Yoshiaki Iwasaki
Studio Distributor	TV Tokyo Madman Entertainment	Starring	None Given
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$34.95	Music	Koichi Korenaga Ritsuko Okazaki

    This is the fourth volume of episodes of Love Hina. The smart way to start is by reading my review of the first volume before reading this one. It might also be worth checking out the second volume and the third volume.

    The four episodes on this disc are:

13. The First Kiss Tastes Like Lemon? Marshmallow?: Grown-up — Shinobu's obsession with with getting her first kiss
14. Reunion? Noru's Crush is a Tokyo U Professor: Turning Into Love? — Kitsune tries to keep Naru from knowing that Seta is back
15. I Love You! Romantic Confession Inside a Cave: Tall Tale — a long-lost turtle civilisation buried under the Hinata Apartments?
16. Monkey Performance at the Seaside Teahouse Hinata: A Kiss? — the Hinata crew putting on a performance of the story we know as Monkey

    I don't know what the record for longest episode titles is, but this series has got to be in the running.

    It's good to see that Shinobu's crush on Keitaro gets resolved. Things get a lot more complicated with the arrival of Seta (the tutor who was Naru's crush, and who is now an archaeology professor) and Sara (his adopted daughter, who is a real brat).

    Their performance of Monkey is a bit indulgent, but very funny, starting with Naru as the hot-headed Monkey (called Son-Goku in this version), and Keitaro as the priest Tripitaka (called Sanzo in this version). Kaolla gets the role of Pigsy, while Motoko ends up as Sandy. Roles get shuffled, and Naru ends up in chains (looking an awful lot like Princess Leia...). It's a more entertaining sequence than I'd have expected it to be.

    There are some very odd scenes featuring turtles, including a lost turtle civilisation, and self-replicating mecha turtles. Makes you think the writer has something of an obsession with turtles.

    One thing occurred to me: if Motoko is a master of secret sword techniques, why does she yell the name of the technique while performing it? Seems an odd way to keep a secret...

    These are some of the stranger episodes of this series, but still very entertaining.

Video

    This DVD transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. That is the original aspect ratio.

    The image is beautifully sharp, perhaps the best of the series so far. There's no film grain, and no low-level noise.

    Colour is superb. There are no colour-related artefacts, but there continues to be some slight ringing, leading to faint haloing on characters.

    There are no film artefacts.

    There is a lot of aliasing and dot crawl, but it is mostly quite minor, although the occasional scene demonstrates a plethora of shimmering black spots. There is some interlacing, but it is generally hard to notice unless you're an obsessive single-stepper (I wish you wouldn't look at me like that). There's no moire, and no MPEG artefacts.

    There are two subtitle tracks. The first subtitles only signs. The second provides full subtitles of the dialogue plus the signs. The subtitles seem well-timed, accurate, and easy to read, in the traditional yellow.

    The disc is single-sided and single-layered. All the episodes together take less than 90 minutes, so they fit comfortably onto the single layer.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in English and Japanese, as is appropriate for anime. Both soundtracks are Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded, which is a reasonable presentation of a television track. I listened to both soundtracks in full. This English soundtrack is recorded at the correct level — the two soundtracks sound quite similar.

    The English dialogue is clear and readily understood. The Japanese dialogue sounds just as clear. This is possibly the first series I prefer to watch in Japanese with subtitles — you can blame the occasional mis-translation, plus the horrible choice of accent for Kitsune, for that.

    Koichi Korenaga's score suits the show well. Ritsuko Okazaki's theme songs are distinctive, and difficult to dislodge from the mind, even for a non-Japanese-speaker.

    The surrounds and subwoofer are not called upon by this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu is animated with music. It offers the episodes (by number), setup, and extras — simple and functional.

Character Photo Gallery

    This gives us a short bio for a character, plus seven images of the character. This disc only has the bio for Kaolla Su. I'm feeling a little stupid — it took until this disc for me to realise that the girl featured in this gallery is the one who appears on the cover with Keitaro, and that the cover shot is replicated as the jacket photo, the menu shot, and the picture label on the disc itself.

Featurette — Making of (7:32)

    This featurette focuses on the process of creating the English dub. They describe the new dubbing process, which is wholly digital — it's quite interesting.

Trailer (1:40)

    The same trailer again.

Madman Propaganda

    Yet another new selection of trailers:

• Neia Under 7 (1:36)
• Real Bout High School (0:31)
• Transformers, the Movie (1:31)

    The Region 1 disc was released mid-2002. The Region 4 was released in December 2002. The two discs hold the same episodes, and pretty much the same extras, although the character profiles cover different characters — there is not a lot of difference between them, although the cover artwork is different (I actually prefer the Region 4 artwork).

    The previous R1 cover blurb mentioned Shinobu questing for her first kiss — that episode actually appears on this disc.

    Judging by reviews, the R1 has a very good transfer. It sounds likely to be slightly better than the R4 (there is specific mention of minimal aliasing).

    The fourth volume of six, providing another four episodes of an entertaining and very funny series.

    The video quality is very good, except for a fair bit of aliasing.

    The audio quality is good.

    The extras include a short, but informative, look at the dubbing process.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall