Maison Ikkoku

First, I want to make a note that the ratings for Art and Sound are somewhat tough to call for this particular series; it is definitely showing its age, the color is washed out, the animations are far from pristine by todays standards, but all of that given, there are inspired flourishes that, at times, challenge the stuff you see coming out of computer-aided studios today. When considering whether you are interested in watching this series, you should look elsewhere if you cannot answer "yes" to these two questions: "Am I patient?" and "Do I enjoy romance?". If you made it past that, you mayfind yourself enjoying this gem from the 80s. Maison Ikkoku primarily revolves around Godai, a spineless loser, who falls for the new manager of his apartment, Kyoko. Unfortunately for him, within the first handful of episodes, it is made clear (I won't say how), that Kyoko's heart is currently out-of-reach. Aside from the overarching romance, it is also a story about everyday life struggles: paying rent, working, going to school, making grades, etc. What it is most of all is the story of a young man getting beat down by life because he won't stand up for himself... and its downright hilarious. Constantly dancing on the line of poverty, Godai is surrounded by devilish, meddlesome neighbors, love rivals, and good-for-nothing friends. Even when he manages to avoid their pitfalls, his own indecisiveness usually foils his attempts at getting ahead in life. When he needs to study for exams, his neighbors invite themselves in for an all-night party, disregarding his pleas for privacy. When he is low on cash, his maybe-unemployed neighbor Yotsuya slithers in from a hole in the wall and steals his food. When he makes strides in his love life, rivals arrive to plunder his achievements. When all else fails, the electricity goes out, he arrives late for exams, or gets kicked out of his apartment. But to make things even better, despite the seeming maliciousness of all these characters, you'll find redeeming qualities abound, and often a hint of goodwill hidden underneath their malicious deeds. Take excellent situational comedy, hilarious and cunning characters, and pair them with the best veteran voice actors of the decade (check them out, you've heard them in some of your favorite shows), and you have a show thats hard to disagree with on an episode-by-episode basis. So its perfect then? Absolutely not. Despite all the praise you may want to award it, the show is long, tedious, and occasionally repetitive. Kyoko's inflexibility controls the pace of the show, and makes for some dramatic scenes, but you may find yourself shaking your fist in frustration over it more than a couple of times. Godai's inability to clarify even the most basic of misunderstandings is a source of humor, but again, will inspire no shortage of annoyance, and when Godai's two would-be girlfriends arrive and generate entire new dimensions of misfortune for Godai, you may nearly lose your patience with the series. But if you make it through that, if you can enjoy the humor, and patiently wait for the romance to work itself out, you will be rewarded greatly. Watching Godai grow as a character is hugely rewarding by itself, combining that with the resolution of certain issues on Kyoko's side, the conclusion of the series proves quite poignant with a lot less of the melodrama you'll get from today's romance anime. Jealousy, pettiness and spite have never been more beautiful. P.S. I'm a fanboy

Maison Ikkoku: the single most maddening piece of media I have ever experienced. Romcoms, and just romance anime in general, is a genre that is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve seen almost all of the big ones and probably enjoy them more than most of the anime community. So naturally I was interested in what some call the grandfather of anime romcoms, Maison Ikkoku. I gave it a shot, and oh boy did I come to regret that decision. The premise is pretty simple. A beautiful widow, Kyoko, moves into, and starts working as the “manager”, in the apartment complex the main character, Godai,and some colorful characters, are living in. It’s more or less love at first sight for Godai, and well, you can probably see where this is going; it’s a typical romcom set-up, with some more serious aspects thrown in. But one of the first things you might wonder is how are they going to handle a 96 episode romcom. Surely you can’t stretch out something that usually takes place over a 12-24 episode show to 96 episodes right? Right? Wrong. It’s like they took everything I dislike about the genre, amplified it to insane levels, and shoved it in my face for almost 100 episodes. Maison Ikkoku is basically “Misunderstandings: The Anime”, and almost all of them could have been quickly resolved with decent communication, or any communication at all. How many times can the main character be caught in a compromising position, have a perfectly valid explanation, only for him to inexplicably fail to properly explain himself at all? If his neighbor ever gets murdered and he is on the other side of the world, he’s going to jail for it, because he will somehow find a way not to tell them he was 2000 miles away when it happened. Or he’ll get interrupted while trying to tell them. Because if I took a shot every time someone got interrupted just as they were about to say something really important, I would be dead after a couple episodes. The amount of times these misunderstandings lead to excessive pouting, or even running away and hiding for days, is laughable. It might be excusable if these were middle school kids, but these are adults in their early-to-mid-20s we’re talking about here. Look, I have a pretty high tolerance for slower love stories, but this is borderline writing malpractice. It’s as if the author knew people lose interest when it goes from the “will they/won’t they phase” to the “couple phase” and wanted to keep making the story, so we were just stuck in that first stage indefinitely. And to make it happen, the main character’s, and to a certain extent the main love interest’s, characters were nearly ruined. Dense would be an understatement. How either of them dress themselves or brush their teeth without adult supervision is a mystery to me. Keep in mind, they are supposed to play the “straight men” to the rest of the apartment complex’s loonies. I’m not going to spend much time on the rest of the residents. They’re a bunch of selfish, drunken idiots that screw up everything they put their grimy hands on and their act wears thin because it’s repeated ad nauseum. Got it? Good. As for the others, Mitaka, Godai’s romantic rival, is probably the only one worth mentioning. He’s pretty much the only main cast member that acts like an actual adult and is able to communicate his feelings semi-effectively. IMO, Mitaka , was the best character in the show, but given he was not the main character, you knew his chances of “winning” Kyoko’s heart were slim-to-none. As far as the animation, it’s an 80s show, so don’t expect to be wowed. This is just a personal preference, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the character design. Many of the adults looked too much like giant children. This problem was not as severe as it is in, say, Key shows, but still, maybe differentiate adults and children by more than just height. Onto sound. None of the OST, OPs, or EDs were even slightly memorable to me. The voice acting, outside of Shigeru Chiba’s performance as the bizarre Yotsuya, was at best average. Kyoko's dog in particular hurt my ears anytime it made any sound whatsoever. I can’t say I hated the show from the beginning; but like an unhappy marriage, it was more of a slow burn to Hatred Town. Even the most interesting aspect of the show, the fact Kyoko was a widow, was mostly mishandled. There were long stretches where I legitimately forgot she was a widow, and then suddenly there would be an episode focusing only on that, only for it to mostly be forgotten by the next episode. And, the thing is, I desperately wanted to love this series, but by the time I got to the end, it had nearly broken me. I would say I cannot believe so many people like Maison Ikkoku, but a lot of people also like getting whipped and beaten. I’m guessing there’s some crossover in that Venn Diagram, because you have to have a little bit of masochist in you to sit through nearly 40 hours of this hellish romcom purgatory.

A lot of anime fans today don't seem to give series from the 80s a real shot, and that's really a shame. There's a lot of truly great storytelling from this era, and it seems to get dismissed because it "looks old". Maison Ikkoku is one of those titles, and it's a crime that more people haven't seen this. There's a real sense of humanity, tenderness, and subtlety in this series that really makes it stand out. It's a romantic comedy, but it's also so much more than that. It's a show about people, how we relate to each other,and how we live our lives. It's about growing up into adulthood, moving on after great loss, and the peaks and valleys in getting together with the love of your life. And the characters are wonderful - they are treated with such love and care by the series. Watching the last half of the series, particularly the last 12 episodes makes this abundantly clear- there is such subtlety and emotion in the character development in this show, that you want -all- of them to be sent off with hapy endings. Admittedly it's perhaps not for everyone. There's no gimmicks or fanservice, and the wacky hijinks, while certainly there (especially in the guise of Godai's neighbors), are somewhat toned down by today's standards. Younger kids probably would have no interest in this kind of show. Some may consider the art and sound a little dated (I graded the art and sound a 7 based on the standards of anime at the time). And 96 episodes may be a little long for some people, but for me it's 100% worth it. But if you want a show about people in their 20s and older (not kids or teenagers) finding love and growing up into adulthood, and want something a little less silly and a little more serious and mature in an anime series, Maison Ikkoku is the absolute perfect show for you.

I find it a bit disheartening that most fans part of the "Rumic" niche are sometimes too focused on a lot of the hyped stuff and all the battles and action that come with it. I don't have anything against the new action series Rumiko creates or anything, but I feel that a majority forget that it was Rumiko's comedies revolving around romance that made her so well-known in the anime/manga world. The story focuses on Yusaku Godai, a struggling, daydreaming student that is resident to a rundown boarding house "Ikkoku-kan". Godai is constantly being torturedby the other tenants whose main purposes in life seem to be making his life hell and have drinking parties in his room on a daily basis. We have Hanae Ichinose, who probably loves consuming alcohol and gossiping more than life itself, Hanae's son Kentaro who thinks of himself as the only sane person in the boarding house, the peeping Mr. Yotsuya whose life is a complete mystery, and the redheaded, boozy bombshell Akemi Roppongi (who always seems to be hungover). When Godai feels that he's at his breaking point with these people and decides to leave, he finds that the old manager of Ikkoku-kan left, and the new manager has just walked through the door with her bags. The beautiful manager is named Kyoko Otanashi and has been recently widowed, looking for work. While the other tenants don't find her to be much of a big deal, Godai takes great interest in the new manager, falling in love with her instantly. The story revolves around Godai overcoming a lot of his personality flaws, like indecisiveness and being socially inept in some cases in order to prove himself worthy of being with Kyoko. However, like a lot of the pairings in Rumiko's works, there are twists in the pair's relationship and others get involved and tangled in some complicated messes. Like when Kyoko signs up for tennis lessons, the tennis coach Shun Mitaka falls for her also. He has looks, success, great ethical and financial background,...and is basically everything Godai isn't. This makes some complications for Godai and with two women that have their eyes on him as well as the nosy tenants miscarrying information, things get even messier. For characters, Rumiko has proven to be a genius with handling them realistically and diversely in each series she makes. Sure, you feel a little "sameness" with some of them (like Inuyasha and Ranma Saotome, with their transformation problems, attitude and all), but what makes the characters practically human with complex personalities and relationships with each other. The animation is about hte same quality as "Urusei Yatsura", which would be a little grainy and stretchy. But heck, this is pretty old, but the animation shouldn't turn people away from a gem like this. The story of "Maison Ikkoku" is very touching and cute. The characters are mostly likeable, the development and progress of the story flows nicely. It's no wonder it's considered one of the best romance animes by so many.

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