A-Girl

I don't know what's up with the very low review score for this OVA on MyAnimeList, but rest assured, A-Girl is one of those hidden gems that makes sifting through all the garbage of late-eighties-early-nineties anime OVAs worth it. It's genuinely something special.

I didn't expect this to be a weird experimental silent film, and I also didn't expect this to be legitimately pretty moving and sweet. The animation is so good, too, which baffles me for how obscure it is. I love it when we get really nice coming-of-age stories for women out of nowhere. Plus, thanks to being a silent film, there's a ton ... of great music!

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.