Two on the Road

 After Heart Cocktail, Watase Seizou released three more anime OVAs based on his stories:

• 1987: Boku no Oldies wa All-Color (My All-Color Oldies)
  
• 1988: Chalk-iro no People (Chalk-Colored People)
  
• 1992: Two on the Road

Like Heart Cocktail, these OVAs never made it across the Digital Divide and are available only on VHS tape and laserdisc. (Oldies and Two aren't even listed in AniDB.) Unlike Heart Cocktail, they have minimal animation and no dialog. Like a silent movie (or A-Girl), they have constant music, and signs or intertitles provide the dialog. The signs conveying the dialog are set as ordinary subtitles; only actual signs have been typeset. 

Two on the Road is the longest of the three. It tells a continuous story about a couple, Akira and Yumi, who are colleagues at work.

They break up and find other partners. 

But something isn't right in the new arrangement, and the original lovers eventually get back together again. 

This happens over a prologue and twelve chapters, mostly titled with riffs on blue and white:

1. Blue White Day
   
2. Blue White Azalea
3. Blue Miss Moon
4. Swing White Fish
5. Lonely Blue Moon
6. Blue Your Back
7. Near and Far
8. Blue Horizon Blues
9. Blue White Christmas
10. Heart Break Road
11. Two on the Road
12. Happy Valentine Day
    

(The English is hardsubbed into the video, mistakes and all.) Each chapter is set to a bluesy ballad by the group BEGIN:

1. Love's Smoke
2. Glider
3. Sea-Roar in the Rear-view Mirror
4. White Fish and Blue Fish
5. Dance on the Sand
6. The Lost Waltz
7. Yearning for You
8. You
9. Blue Snow
10. Born on this Earth
11. In Place of Kindness
12. This Is Just the Beginning
    

Appropriately, much of the "action" is set in a music venue called Jim's Bar. I quite like the music, and the simple story is easy to follow.

Once again, this is a collaboration between DarkWispers, Orphan, and LonelyChaser. Darkonius translated. Yume translation checked. ninjacloud timed, both songs and "dialog." I edited and typeset. Nemesis and Uchuu QCed. The source is a Japanese laserdisc, ripped on the Domesday Duplicator by an anonymous friend and encoded by Rezo. MartyMcflies provided vital coordination.

I must mention that the source is a mess, and it seemed impossible to get a decent raw out of it. One key problem was ringing. When that was stamped out, there were rainbows everywhere. Finally, with enough patience and enough filters, Rezo got a usable raw. It still has some ringing, but it's been tamped down quite a bit. The audio is FLAC from the laserdisc's digital track.

I must also mention that this is the "busiest" of the three shows. Boku no Oldies wa All-Color used English-language songs, which could be treated as background music. Chalk-Colored People had instrumental music. Here, both the songs and the "dialog" required subtitles. I found it a bit distracting to watch the different sets of words pass by at different rates, but I can't think of a better solution.

Two on the Road is the last of Watase Seizou's "musical manga," but it's not the last word on his works. Heart Cocktail Colorful is still out there, and perhaps, In the Fullness of Time™, we'll get to it. Meanwhile, you can get this show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #new on irc.rizon.net.