Review for Rozen Maiden: Ouverture

Introduction

OVA discs always fill me with a bit of trepidation. It’s not so much the content, although on occasion the OVA episode can often just be an excuse for blatant fan service, as it is the value for money question. It’s why it’s so much of a relief when shows are released in the West with OVA episodes included as standard. Paying full whack for a disc with less than an hour’s content is never easy to recommend, although companies do on occasion add a little extra value to try and make things more attractive. Rozen Maiden: Ouverture isn’t one of these titles though, and its two episodes come with no extras to sweeten the bait. Rozen Maiden was a surprisingly entertaining tale about magically animated dolls forming partnerships with humans, in order to battle in the Alice Game. The winner would get to meet ‘Father’, the one that created them. For such a typical anime premise, the show delivered surprising depth and complexity, with rich and well-rounded characters. That offers some hope at least that the Rozen Maiden OVA won’t just be two episodes of dolls in swimsuits at the beach.


Jun Sakurada is a wimpy teen, who after being bullied at middle school simply came home, pulled the covers over his head, and refused to leave the house again. That’s despite the best efforts of his sister Nori, who kept trying to coax him back to school. He became a shut-in, a recluse, whose only joy was Internet shopping, and only thrill was keeping the stuff for the trial period, and then sending it back before he became liable for payment. Then one day he answered an ad that was unconventional to say the least. As if by magic, a trunk appeared in the middle of the room and within the trunk were a clockwork doll, and a key. After checking for underwear (well he is a boy), he wound up the doll, only for it to come to life and slap him. Shinku is awake now, and insolent though he may be, Jun is now her servant.


Rozen Maiden Ouverture (there’s an umlaut in there somewhere) is set prior to the climax of the Traumend series, with the Jun Sakurada household immersed in spring cleaning. Shinku of course places her own demands ahead of Jun’s needs, and demands that he repair one of her dresses. Thinking that he’s getting her a gift, Jun decides to buy her a brooch to repair it with, but triggers an almighty snit instead. It falls to Souseiseki to explain just why it was a bad idea, and she tells Jun the story of how Shinku first met her mortal enemy, Suigintou.

The two episodes of Rozen Maiden: Ouverture are presented by MVM on a single layer disc.

1. Eternity – Ewigkeit
2. Vanity – Eitelkeit

Picture

We’ve moved on in the world of anime transfers, but Rozen Maiden: Ouverture is something of a blast from the past, with its 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer an NTSC-PAL standards conversion. Ghosting and blended frames are evident, although really only when you pause the image and frame advance. More telling is an overall softness indicative of a lower resolution source which doesn’t reflect more recent native PAL transfers. Recently MVM and Madman had an appealing result when they kept the progressive NTSC format for the .hack//Quantum release and that approach would have been preferable here to the standards conversion.


All that whinged, it’s still a very nice show to watch, reminiscent of the rest of the series, although with a little more budget to flesh out the details. Most of Ouverture is set in a flashback, for which the story adopts a sepia overtone, using a more autumnal palette to colour its world and its characters. The action also shifts to Victorian London, and the animators do a nice job in capturing the flavour of the era while still maintaining the magical tone of the story.

Sound

Just as in the series, the audio comes in DD 2.0 English and Japanese flavours, with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. Rozen Maiden really gets some truly gothic music that suits its story well, and Ouverture’s end theme song is quite special. I went with the Japanese audio and found it much to my liking. The English dub impressed me just as much as before (that is not at all), although dub fans may note that there isn’t the same continuity of voice cast as the Japanese version. There was a long gap between the series and the OVA getting a release in the US, and so you’ll find Suigintou’s voice, and Suiseiseki’s to have changed. The subtitles are clear, accurately timed, and free of error.

Extras

Ouverture only got a US release last year, which is why it fell to Sentai Filmworks to licence it after they had rescued the first two seasons from Geneon. That shows in this release as it contains the now common Sentai practice of retaining the Japanese language credits in the show, and adding a white on black text translated credit reel afterwards.

Otherwise all that you’ll find on this disc, with its static menus and jacket picture, are trailers for other MVM releases, Rosario and Vampire, Broken Blade, and Fruits Basket.

Conclusion

Value for money is something of a false economy. After all, even if they were the same price, I would still take just six episodes of FLCL over all 9000 episodes of Dragon Ball Z in a heartbeat. Of course you probably would still want to know if those six episodes were any good. In the case of Rozen Maiden Ouverture, the disc is definitely worth picking up if you are a fan of the prim and proper doll Shinku and her world. Thankfully Rozen Maiden Ouverture isn’t one of those cash in OVAs that offer a bit of nonsense and oodles of fan service to buyers who choose not to discriminate, although it does start off deceptively with a bit of silliness in the Jun Sakurada household. The thrust of the story is far more significant though, told in flashback, and concerning Shinku’s first meeting with her arch enemy Suigintou.


There’s not a lot of story that will fit in just two episodes, so I won’t spoil it here, but it once again shows off the richness of the world, the depth of the writing, and the enchanting complexities of the characters. It’s set during an earlier round of the Alice Game, when the dolls awoke in Victorian England, and the world design and characters reflect that austere era well. The story sheds a little more light on Father and the Alice Game as it chronicles Shinku and Suigintou’s first meeting, although it’s completely unlike what you would expect, given their abrasive relationship in the series. It shows that the Alice Game and Father are what give the dolls life, and you get to see what lies behind Suigintou’s unique nature here, which bears on how Shinku first approaches her.


It also shows how warping and dark the dolls obsession for Father and the nature of the Alice Game is. It taints the way the dolls relate to each other, and you can see how Suigintou and Shinku came to loathe each other in this story. There’s also some foreshadowing played out here as to how the Suiseiseki and Souseiseki sisters’ story would resolve in the series.


There’s not a lot you can do with just 45 minutes of time to tell a story, but Rozen Maiden Ouverture makes the best use of it. It’s a nice supplement to the original Rozen Maiden and Rozen Maiden Traumend series, as it adds much to the back story behind the Alice Game, but by filling in Suigintou and Shinku’s shared past, it makes Suigintou’s character more sympathetic, and adds an unexpected, but understandable resentment in Shinku’s character as well. Rozen Maiden fans shouldn’t hesitate in buying the Ouverture OVA, as it fits in very nicely with the series.