Baby Love

Baby Love is such a familiar shoujo romance that it seemed like a refugee from the Margaret Video Series, but it was actually made somewhat later. Dating from 1997, it retells the first nine chapters of the much-longer shoujo manga by Shiina Ayumi, which has been fully scanlated into English. Indeed, the only thing is has in common with Margaret OVAs is that it too was marooned on VHS tape, not even receiving a laserdisc release.

Baby Love is an age gap romance. When she's quite young, Seara develops a crush on Seto Shuuhei, who is three years older. He tells her brusquely to forget it, because she's just a kid.

Fast forward four years, and Seara, now 11, has grown 46cm and is unrecognizable. When her parents conveniently move overseas, she moves in with Shuuhei's family and starts planning how to ensnare her man. Because she has grown so much, Shuuhei, who is now in middle school, doesn't recognize her. Besides, he likes girls who are well-endowed, which the pre-puberty Seara certainly is not.

The OVA is a series of set pieces about Seara's machinations and how they go comically awry. She inveigles Shuuhei to take her to an amusement park, only to learn, first hand, the kind of girls Shuuhei is attracted to. She infiltrates his school, only to attract the unwanted attention of Shuuhei's friend Rai. She sets up a visit to a skating rink, only to run into a passel of Shuuhei's middle school friends. And finally, she accepts Rai's invitation to go shopping, hoping to make Shuuhei jealous, and ends up with more than she bargained for. Pretty standard shoujo stuff.

The voice cast includes:

• Kasahara Hiroko (Seara) played the title roles in Armitage III and Mahou Angel Sweet Mint, Maron in Assemble Insert, Nanako in Dear Brother, Ami in DNA^2, Fuu in the Rayearth properties, Tama in the Tama and Friends franchise, and Hinako in Ultimate Teacher.
• Okada Tatsuya (Shuuhei) was primarily a stage actor and has only a few credits. He appeared in Whisper of the Heart and You're Under Arrest.
• Takeuchi Junko (Koharu, Shuuhei's sister) starred as Naruto in the Naruto franchise, Gon in the original Hunter x Hunter series, Kuromi in the Onegai My Melody properties, and Rin in the Eiga Precure franchise. She played the title role in Photon, Sabo in One Piece, and Tina in the Sisters of Wellber series. She appeared in Shirokuma Cafe, an Orphan release.
• Madono Mitsuaki (Rai) played Charlie in the Angelique franchise, Kon in the Bleach franchise, Aichou in Ninku, and Kou Reishin in the Saiunkoku Monogatari series. He appeared in the first Ultra Nyan OVA, an Orphan release.

The director, Kudou Susumu, helmed projects as diverse as some of the Angelique OVAs, K the TV series, the Mardock Scramble movies, and They Are My Noble Masters.

The project has an interesting origin. blindrezo wanted a new raw of the series for Masterpiece Fansub, a Brazilian fansub team. He asked Intrepid to buy a used VHS tape and rip it on Orphan's non-compressing capture setup. blindrezo then encoded the rip for the Masterpiece team, while Intrepid encoded it for Orphan. Masterpiece did a new, direct translation from Japanese to Brazilian Portuguese, while Orphan translation-checked and heavily modified the existing English subs. Thus, there will be two new versions, with different translations, in different languages, using different encodes, from a common source tape. It's a funny world.

Orphan started with the fansub version by Fivestar. M74 transcribed and rough timed the subs. ninjcloud fine timed. convexity translated the ending song, which had not been done, and found enough problems with the original subs to do a complete translation check; significant changes were made. I edited and typeset. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed. Intrepid encoded from an uncompressed rip of a second-hand Japanese VHS tape.

So on the one hand, Baby Love is pretty generic shoujo fare. On the other hand, it's not terrible, and the age gap is probably not big enough to make a Western audience squirm. This version looks better than the previous English release, it's more accurate, and it's softsubbed. What's not to like? You can get Baby Love from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.