Outlanders

This is an old OVA that follows the short promote-the-manga format, so it depicts only a glimmer of the source material and clocks in under an hour. It functions as a pilot, doesn't end altogether unsatisfactorily, and they at least finish what appears to be a whole arc, though character development and backstory were most likely heavily excised. Outlanders is a gorier and raunchier b-movie version of Urusei Yatsura, more or less. Yasuomi Umetsu brings the ketchup in the earlier scenes, and there are plenty of lewd jokes and botched sex scenes, as this is an ecchi rather than a hentai. It's one of thosestories where two different alien races intend to marry each other so as to usher in peace rather than war and genocide. It's actually kind of gross considering how many of their own people they kill willy-nilly, often for laughs (this is what really tends to be very off-putting about these John Lennon COME TOGETHER-esque scripts). Kahm looks like Lum from UY, only I'd describe her hair as gator-colored here, she has more obtrusive demon girl horns, and her face has this squashed look that's kind of an ugly hallmark of the character designer. The main character is generic enough that it would be impossible to spot him in a lineup if you watched this thing 100 times. We're graced with a cat girl as well, who has third degree bestiality with a burly cat man. I don't know the proper degree, but I imagine it's not as egregious if you're a cat girl... the little hobbit lizards are kind of amusing as gag characters, but their writing is just the same old sex joke over and over. The opening sequence is pretty entertaining, as is the sword fight between Kahm and cat-ears. Good-enough storyboarding and directing and sometimes pretty decent animation, but the quality is inconsistent and spotty, and i wouldn't say there are too many highlights beyond what I've outlined, and there's certainly better elsewhere for all of the animators that I'm familiar with who worked on this production. There's really nothing too terribly noteworthy to point out, other than the goofy fight scene between catboi and the main: the outcome was obvious, and the main was just doing the Ivanhoe-styled chivalry of "I will simp for thee to the death to protect thy honor, fair maiden" thing for a girl he's known for about an hour (who tried to kill him once during that hour). It's a totally pointless scene, and they were already fugitives INSIDE the fortress they needed to escape from. Talk about priorities. Everything else just screams of rush-job or cliche, and you can expect the writing to be unmemorable in all respects.

The OVA has some very obviously similarities with Urusei Yatsura, and you can easily guess that it was influenced by UY in the first place. An extraterrestrial girl comes to earth and takes a useless boy as her groom, against her people wishes, she uses a flames like power on one of the scenes agains the boyfriend and she even has a girl-friend that looks/behaves like Benten. For the anime version they even coloured her hair in green, that looking by the cover of the manga was yellow, and used the same Seyuu of Lum, Fumi Hirano, to do the voice work. Coincidence? I don'tthink so. The character designs are very similar to those of Takahashi anime versions at the time, but that character design was in vogue at the time, so let's leave that detail. There are obviously some differences; there is more blood, even gore at the beginning, and more echii stuff that UY would even dare to use. The story is nothing sort of memorable. But in the end it was an entertaining OVA, even if it was to spot the UY similarities. Rate: 6.4/10

The Outlanders manga by Johji Manabe spanned almost three dozen comic book issues in America, and was one of those series that any manga reader of the time collected. And, for most people my age, that was their first exposure to Outlanders and Manabe. This OVA, by comparison, is just a 45-minute one-shot that sort of came and went without a splash; noteworthy only for the hilarously bad vanity-dub by Trish LeDoux. Is it really fair to compare the two versions? I mean, the manga contains hundreds of pages of artwork and a broad, expansivestory that took a few years to develop. But you can't cover all of that in a short animated bit like this. The OVA has several characters stripped out and all of the intermingled sub-plots removed, leaving a bare-bones version of the main plot in its stead. Even then, there's not time to develop that properly, as the main characters are reduced to little more than crass horndogs. (Not to say that wasn't in the manga as well; it's just that there were more dimensions to the characters than just that). And rushed right through, with a what-the-hell ending. The artwork also suffers somewhat in comparison to the manga, which was crisp and clean black and white linework with very intricate designs at times, which does not translate well to a low-budget anime production. And the animation likewise suffers because of this. Not to say this is the worst little story in the world, far from it. But if you come to this having read through the manga first, you are only going to be disappointed in comparison.