An insane, funny, and incredibly weird anime, this is by far the strangest show I've ever seen. Young child-actress Kurata Sana (eleven years old) lives with her mother, who won the Aoki Award (a prestigious award) for writing, along with Sagami Rei, a man with sunglasses whom she declares to be her boyfriend, manager, and … pimp. Mind you, Sana doesn't know what a pimp really does - just the paying money part. She's a child actress, starring on the show Kodomo no Omocha, which fans often call Kodocha. Sana is often referred to as 'caffeine personified.' Hayama Akito is her ultimate rival at the beginning of this anime - he and his gang do everything from blackmailing and tormenting their teacher (paint-filled water guns) to dumping people in the pond. Sana, sick of all the corruption at school, decides to stop him forever. Akito is sort of scary - he never talks with emotion, and his eyes never change expressions, whereas Sana bounces off the walls - literally. Oh, and if you want more weird characters, there's also a strange white bat (it doesn't really look like a bat…) called Babbitt that flies around, telling the viewers of this anime some inside info. Just how weird is this anime? Well, Sana 'raps' in almost every single episode - and her mother wears a new hat every single episode, along with a squirrel named Maro-chan that lives in them. By hat, I mean for example, in episode one, her mother wore a miniature, growing tree. Her mother also drives around the house in a miniature red convertible - it reminds me of those huge Barbie cars that kids can buy and drive around the yard in.
Completely funny, this anime actually came out after the OVA series (which was a flop). This show, zany and flighty as it may seem, actually covers some incredibly real and touching points in life - for all of twenty seconds. For instance, in the first few episodes, the real issue is Akito's family - he may be a complete jerk, but his family certainly doesn't help. In the first 28 episodes, it covers issues from emotional abuse to child abandonment, and even though the show's characters act silly about the topics, they're not actually trying to hide how harsh it is. That's just how they deal with it.
The plot of this show really amazes me, especially how it bounces around on topics. It does it really well - the transitions from subject to subject are smooth, and the episodes are all original. There are no strings really left hanging anywhere - even things that seem unimportant, or forgiven and forgotten, pop up later to be truly resolved. It covers so many different topics, and very straight forwardly - they don't hide anything or fluff it up. Not to mention that they stick hundreds of allusions in here, from making fun of other anime (the Akazukin Cha Cha reference is hysterical [Editor's note: Hey, I think I saw that first :P]) to the three thousand Japanese cultural references, 95% of which I don't understand anyway, but are nevertheless funny. Sana will often say a famous quote with one word that's wrong, and usually, the word that she mixed up has similar writing to the real word. Babbitt, the little white bat, flies around (there's more than one) and will explain most of her mix-ups, as well as making fun of Sana and anyone else on screen. This anime has the unique ability to make fun of itself, what with Babbitt putting signs all over the place about how wrong Sana is and why (if you're wondering, the characters don't notice him 99% of the time), to the main characters themselves making remarks like, "Keep it clean with the fights! This is shoujo anime!" and "'Ack! My hair cut is wrong!' 'Don't worry, since this is an anime, no one will notice anyway.'"
Especially noticeable in this show is the change of attitudes in the characters themselves. At the beginning of the show, Akito is remorseless, unpitying, and truly cruel to people. After all of Sana's persuasions, he realizes what kind of person he is, and truly regrets it - something fully evident even in episode 25. He comes to even develop a crush on Sana - really bringing new meaning to the term, "Opposites attract." The characters really make obvious changes throughout the show, something I was able to notice in just the 28 episodes I've watched. It requires a lot of fast reading on my part - the characters talk incredibly fast - at least Sana does - and sometimes, more than one person talks at once. The voice actress for Sana is incredible - keeping up with Sana's character requires a lot of effort. Odd note - everybody but Akito calls Sana 'Sana-chan', even complete strangers. This is mainly because since she's a famous actress, they 'know her' well enough to call her by her real name. Akito, for reasons of his own, goes against the flow and calls her 'Kurata', which people should call her, but don't.
[Editor's note: Kylara veers off here...turn back now...you have been warned...]
If any of you have seen pictures of this show, compare it to the one of Marmalade Boy, also reviewed on this site. Yes, Sana-chan and Akito look pretty much like younger versions of Miki and Yuu, respectively. Sana, when not jumping off the walls, looks remarkably like Miki. When Yuu is frowning, Akito looks like him at age eleven. Kodocha is sometimes referred to as "Marmalade Boy on Crack", which brings up the funniest joke I heard about the show - I don't remember where.
Person One: Kodocha is Marmalade Boy on Crack.
Person Two: What are you talking about? Marmalade Boy is already on crack!
Kodocha and Marmalade Boy are often compared in essays - and really, I have no idea why. Other than those two characters designs, there is barely anything else that's similar. It's really odd. Kodocha is about - well, everything, and it's extremely hyper, whereas Marmalade Boy is a much slower drama centered on love dodecagons. If you look long enough, similarities can be brought up - I'd say that another one is that Yuu's emotions are fairly hard to read - but Akito is much worse. Yuu laughs everything off, and Akito just isn't fond of talking, period. That's barely a similarity as it is. If you want to get really technical, both anime have periods where one of the characters goes to New York City for work (Sana for acting [not in episodes 1-28], Yuu for architecture study) and then flashes back and forth between the two places. So why do people continue to compare these two obviously different anime? Clearly, I don't know either, because that's what I just did.
[ OAV ]
The Kodomo no Omocha OVA is about Kurata Sana, a child actress on a show called "Kodomo no Omocha." Her life is tormented by the doings of Hayama Akito, who is a boy in her class at school that destroys the classroom daily. Annoyed with the fact that he's ruining the school, she strikes back at him (even though he didn't actually do anything to her in particular) with her own machinations. This OAV is only half an hour long, ending on a very odd note.
The TV show is infinitely more popular - and much better than the OVA. The OVA isn't positively horrible, but you can't help comparing it to the TV show, and that's where you notice all seventy million differences that make it worse. To my surprise, it actually follows the manga more accurately than the TV show.
The plot is enjoyable and interesting, but it seems like it was crammed in much too quickly. In half an hour, it covers the entire first volume of the manga - that many acts are usually covered in a much longer amount of time. Things happen very fast, plot-wise, when a bit more time might have made things better. Or, maybe that's just the part of me that adores the TV show talking.
Hayama remains generally the same until the scene in the park, which is more than three-quarters of a way through the OVA. It seems like Hayama was always 'this bad,' and that Sana's efforts didn't reach him until then, even though it seemed like he changed. It was a very late characterization, but it worked fine. As for Sana herself, she is an incredibly annoying character. She's dense, blames too much on Hayama, and despite her efforts in other areas, she's still incredibly aggravating. She does, however, have a few redeeming qualities, and that saves this show from turning bad to worse.
The other characters in the show play a much more minor role than in the manga or TV - her mother, her manager, and several other characters are much more downplayed then they were anywhere else. Mainly, the OVA is about Sana and Hayama - oh, and Tsuyoshi supports them, but even he plays a very teeny part. Because of that, development in both plot and characters is limited - and then you have the limiting half-hour factor to deal with. All of this combined worked against the show. Added to this is that I thought the characters were on the whole, pretty darn ugly. They looked 'nicer' in both the anime tv series and the manga, and I must admit, I'm not used to seeing Sana-chan blonde. Besides all of that, this is an average to below average anime - not completely horrible, but definitely nowhere near wonderful, either.
