Aishiteruze Baby Anime: The Animated Version

I have to be up front with you. I couldn't find this anime complete, and the version I did find had Japanese sound with English subtitles. That was, of course, somewhat distracting and there were a few times that I had to back it up so I could read the words again. I have tried very hard not to let that cloud my judgment on this. I have had to see a good bit of anime in this fashion and I've grown somewhat used to it by now, so I feel confident that I have managed to set that aside.

The good news is that almost all of the characters from the manga were carried over into the anime version. The artwork is there, so you won't have any difficulty recognizing any of them. The animation is good enough and the story is intact, as far as it goes. More on that later... We still see Kippei, the teen-aged Casanova, have to turn his life upside-down when he is suddenly in charge of Yazuyu, his five-year-old cousin. We get to see him change from the guy who says, "Why did this have to happen to me?", into the guy who can't bear to think that anything bad might happen to Yazuyu. He becomes both mom and dad to this little girl and he wouldn't want it any other way.

The bad news is that it's incomplete and that there have been some significant changes made along the way. Maybe there is a complete version of this, and I just haven't found it yet, but I get the idea that this is simply not the case. The manga version went to 33 episodes, and I said before that they were all necessary. This only went to 26 episodes and the story is not finished. There are at least two characters that have not been introduced when you get to the last episode and the ending is not there, so nothing is resolved.

The other thing that bothered me is that they made some subtle, and some not-so-subtle, changes to the series. There is a point where Kippei has a rival in love, and he shows himself to be a force to be reckoned with, in his handling of the situation. This had a fundamental change to it and the whole episode was clouded with the fact that what I saw in the anime was not what I saw in the manga. There was also a "bad girl" in the manga who made a threat with a knife. In the anime version, the knife became a key chain. Where is the threat in a key chain? It altered the whole meaning of the episode, again, and I was more than a little put off by it. This has always bothered me when a book has been turned into a movie, and it bothers me in this case, too. If a story is so good that it becomes popular, why does a film producer or director have this uncontrollable urge to "improve" it? I think that these people should sit at their word processors and try to come up with their own original stories before they go changing things in someone else's story.

Overall, I'm still glad that I found the anime and, maybe someday I'll find a complete rendering of the manga story. This was still a good story, but it didn't have the same impact as the original work. It never brought me to the verge of tears and at the end I was left hanging.