Elf Princess Rane

Original Title: 妖精姫レーン
Romanized: Youseihime Reen
Literal: Fairy Princess Rane

Plot Synopsis

The setting is a pastoral town in the near future. A pastoral town with a mecha-equipped fire department and a powerful corporation trying to convert the town into an elaborate amusement park.

Oblivious to all this as well as most of reality in general is young Takarada Go, who from a young age has been fascinated with treasure hunting. His parents are off on an archaeological dig overseas, but he's forced to settle for the mystery and riches that he can get to on his bike. Despite the fact that he manages to see ancient treasures in the most unlikely places (whether they're there or not), his luck suddenly changes when he runs across Rane, a fairy princess who has come to the world of humans with a mission: recover the Four Hearts and save her people! She doesn't speak the human language, but that's not about to stop Go from assuming that she's the key to the adventure he's been seeking.

And with all the mayhem that follows Go around, who knows--maybe there is something special about him other than the ability to totally misinterpret any predicament he's in.

Quick Review

Rating: 4 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2005-07-01

Something like the manic fever dream Indiana Jones might have if he fell asleep watching Tenchi Muyo, Elf Princess Rane is chaotic, dizzyingly-paced, so stupid you can feel your brain cells screaming, and doesn't just nail the mark that so many other whacked-out comedies aim for, it drops a tactical nuke on it. In essence, it takes a nonsensical string of misunderstandings masquerading as a plot, loads it with anime references, and runs through it as fast as is humanly possible, with the fever-pitch dialogue and rapid-fire jokes occasionally broken up by moments of quiet (but still humorous) reflection before launching back into the chaos.

Elf Princess Rane is a masterpiece of hyperactive comedy and brilliantly erratic timing, but it is so extreme that only fans of this sort of thing will want anything to do with it.

US DVD Review

The DVD is a basic but solid production; the cute menus give you access to an small gallery of production stills, a few trailers, and the well indexed feature. The video transfer is quite nice, and although the Japanese stereo audio track is a bit soft (and I could swear that in several scenes with multiple characters talking simultaneously the side that the audio was coming from was inverted), it's still clear and the English track is very crisp. The subtitles, though commendably accurate (and entirely different from the dubbed dialogue), suffer from the fact that they were all the same color; even with the limits of DVD soft-subtitling technology, they still could have had at least two colors (as they did in the VHS version, in fact), which would have helped pick out who was saying what in some of the particularly chaotic scenes. They also failed to translate the Japanese cast, but at least the original credits were left intact, so you can find a translation on this page.

Content Guide

The basic idea is clean, but quite a bit of nudity push this one into the 13-up rating that AnimeWorks gave it, and depending on your standards that may have been generous--I would call it 16-up.

Violence: 1 - Lots of yelling and smacking around, but it's bloodless and silly.

Nudity: 3 - A couple of scenes in part 1, and a lot of bath-related nudity in part 2.

Sex/Mature Themes: 1 - One ambiguous same-sex kiss.

Language: 2 - A few strong words, a few more in the dub.

Notes and Trivia

Picking apart the dialogue, jokes, and references in this too-short series could fill a book. I'm not obsessed enough to even try to do that, but since the subtitlers, as good a job as they did with literal translation, didn't make much of an effort to translate any of the (surprisingly sparse) puns in the dialogue, and the dubbed dialogue was much different, I'll point out the major translation oversights.

To start with, there's the tile; "Elf Princess Rane" probably isn't the best translation as the word "yousei," translated as "elf" in this production, really means something more like "fairy." Traditionally elves were, of course, a type of fairy, but due both to the modern fantasy connotations of "elf" and the fact that even in the traditional sense "fairy" seems to more appropriately describe what the little folk in this series are, I wouldn't have translated it that way.

On the pun front, the main character's name is one; Takarada Gou sounds like the sentence "It's treasure. Go!", which is of course perfect for his character. A related joke comes from mispronouncing his name; where Mari calls him "Gou-kun" (a normal way to refer to a friend of his sort), Leen keeps mangling that into "Gokkun," which roughly means "gulp." Among Leen's several other mangled phrases is an onion-related pun that was translated literally in the subtitles. Go's line about going home and flat frogs is a play on the fact that "kaeru" can mean either "to go home" or "frog" (the flat part just sounds funny, and may have been a reference to an old anime show about a kid with a flat, talking frog on his shirt).

There are other things that don't quite translate, such as the Fire Department Chief, whose dialogue is extremely feminine in Japanese (he's a bit effeminate in the dub, but there aren't female-only words in English), or the quick shot at the end of the first episode credits featuring the standard cute girl line encouraging fans to see the next installment (that much was probably clear), which sounds downright wrong coming from a man, and an old one at that.

Also on the language front, the big-haired stud's dialogue is much funnier in Japanese than either the subtitles or the dub make clear; in the original Japanese there are a handful of words that make sense (those are translated in the subtitles), and some complete garbage, but a lot of his dialogue is made up of bits and pieces of various strong dialects from around Japan--Okinawa, Northern Japan, etc. This makes it marginally more understandable, and at least if you ask me somewhat funnier on account of the hodgepodge.

Last is a semi-mistranslation, probably chosen for simplicity. The "One Inch Priest" that Go keeps referring to is actually "Issunboushi," a character from a Japanese fairy tale. The one inch part is correct (issun refers to a short unit of old-fashioned Japanese measurement), but the character was actually the tiny (non-priest) son of an old couple. He traveled to Kyoto to find work and was hired by a nobleman there as a companion for his daughter. Issunboushi eventually rescues her from an ogre, who drops a magical mallet that she uses to make him normal size.

Availability

Two OAVs available on one hybrid DVD from AnimeWorks; was also available on subtitled or dubbed VHS.

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