Practice Makes Perfect (A-Girl v3)

You were probably not expecting (or needing) this: a fourth version of the 1993 shoujo OVA A-Girl. Well, practice makes perfect.

In 1992, Madhouse and Margaret Comics collaborated on an OVA of the shounen-ai romance Zetsuai 1989. This was successful, and in 1993, Madhouse issued six additional OVAs based on Margaret Comics properties:

• Oshare Kozou wa Hanamaru
• Singles
• Pops
• Oeda wa Nemurenai!
• Kiss wa Hitomi ni Shite
• A-Girl

Unfortunately, these additional OVAs were not successful and quickly sank into obscurity. None of them made it to laserdisc, let alone DVD.

A-Girl is based on a 1984 shoujo romance manga by Fusako Kuramochi. It tells a very simple story: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy. High-school student Mariko and her elder sister Mayu are forced out of their apartment by a fire and move in with their landlord. Mariko meets the landlord's handsome son, Natsume, who is also a model. They fall in love but break up when Mariko discovers that Natsume is seeing other girls. Eventually, they are reunited, and the end credits roll.

A-Girl has had a fairly twisted release history. The first raw we found, back in September 2016, was defective: small (512 x 384) and missing the end credits. Apparently, it was stitched together from three pieces on YouTube. It was released as v0. The second raw, from 2017, was based on a used VHS tape purchased in Japan. It wasn't perfect either. Tape stretch caused noticeable audio distortion in three places, but at least it was complete. It formed the basis of v1. In late 2017, Intrepid realized that the audio distortion could be overcome. He made a new audio track, and I spliced the new track over the old one in the three chapters that were broken, creating v2.

Subsequently, Intrepid made significant improvements in his VHS ripping capability, setting up an uncompressed capture system based on antique computing equipment. This worked well and allowed for significant improvements in video quality. However, the audio issues in A-Girl made me shy away from ripping it again. Then, the entire capture setup was felled by hardware issues.

Recently, Intrepid bought another antique computer and a new VHS deck. He decided to revisit A-Girl, because his earlier rip suffered from color distortion. Happily, the new rip is free from both color distortion and audio issues. The encode looks distinctly better. Finally, here is a release that is complete (v1), free of audio distortion (v2), with proper colors (v3).

Here's a frame from v3, and below it, the same frame from v2:

A-Girl was the directorial debut of Kousaka Kitarou. (He also did the character designs.) He later worked for many years as an animation director and key animator on Ghibli films before achieving prominence as the director of the award-winning Nasu: Anadalusia no Natsu. For A-Girl, he chose a novel approach: he made a "silent movie." A-Girl has minimal dialog and is performed against a background of Japanese pop songs composed by Okada Tooru and sung (in English!) by SEIKA. (I think she does Mariko's six lines of dialog, too.) Dialog placards provide continuity, as in old silent films. It works pretty well and doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.

Iri bought the VHS tape for this release.He also translated and timed. I edited and typeset, Nemesis and Eternal_Blizzard did QC, and Intrepid ripped and encoded. For this release, Iri corrected a couple of signs, I tweaked line breaks for more consistent display across video players, and Uchuu and Topper3000 release checked.
 
You can get this latest, and I sincerely hope the last, version of A-Girl from the usual torrent sites or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net. If you like the music, the soundtrack is available as well, in glorious FLAC audio.