Carol

The music of the world is starting to disappear, even the sounds of the Big Ben are not heard anymore. We start this OVA with a girl named Carol, your decent teenager and pretty much average like anyone else at her age. Her father is a famous classical music composer and he's having problems doing music at the time. Sometimes she hears a voice calling her name but she doesn't know what it is until she is suddenly transported to another world. It happens that some guys there wanted her help to rescue a friend of theirs that was captive at the foes lair and then to destroy the huge beast that was consuming all the music in the world and would eventually consume all the sounds of th4e universe. The premise wasn't that bad, yes, reading the stuff above, makes the imagination travel and think that it may turn into something interesting eventually. There's two ways from here, or we'll have a great oldie watching session with a overall good production or we'll have a old anime crap time. It could have turned out into something memorable or something forgettable, unfortunately it was for the later case. The animation was not the best, could easily been made in '85 without any effort, but there were some major flaws in this title that went beyond the animation field and that pushed it to the land of obscurity. The story had major holes that could have been easily fixed if it had a proper care. Questions like, "Why did they do this?" "Why did they do that" in certain scenes keeps popping out, " why did they show this here?", etc... The story wraps in a bad way and leaves stuff unexplained and there even were some parts that even though it had it's sort of explanation, you just couldn't understand. The end of the story reserves no surprise and it is a ultra forced happy ending. As you can see, this is an OVA of 59 min, it's hard to make a character growth in due time, but they tried to do it here, they failed horribly, so the characters came out being pretty weak, especially the lead role, Carol. All in all, it was an entertaining watch for the laughs and the WTF moments that weren't' suppose to be WTF moments, especially the "cool sunglasses elf", must be seen to be believed. It deserves well the honour of "so bad it's good" title. Rate: 4:5/10

When I read the brief description of the story, I was sure this was probably some kid's story with a morality lesson or something. As in, something for six year olds. It's a the type of plot you might expect from super magical girl show (a la PreCure) or something. But nope, turns out it's more of a shoujo story aimed at young teen girls (I think the protagonist is fifteen). And the story is played out seriously, at that. Once you strip away the seemingly childish elements from the story description, it does boil down to a pretty standard shoujo story type. Just like, say, Harukanaru or Twelve Kingdoms or Fushigi Yugi. And that is, ordinary teenage girl from the modern day ends up travelling to a fantasy world, gets surrounded by a bevy of pretty-boys who help her along the way, and she has some special position or power that could SAVE THE WORLD! Eh, it's not a terrible story, but it's well-trodden territory, which has been done with much more panache by other anime, than this 60-minute story. And setting aside the story, the artwork is...okay...and the animation is...almost okay. Just give this one a pass, there's other anime out there that does this story better.

The 1-episode OVA “Carol” is the anime portion of a music-themed mixed media project spearheaded by members of the pop-rock band TM NETWORK, featuring character designs by Yun Koga (“Earthian”). The story is based on a novel by one of the band members, which itself is inspired by a concept album the band put out before that. Most of the music in “Carol” is from this album, and the three main male characters are modeled after the band’s members. One of them is even voiced by a band member (and you can tell because of how wooden his performance is compared to the rest). So, is the story any good? Well, the premise itself is okay, but it’s executed poorly. Concepts are not defined well enough to maintain plot coherency. The gist of the plot is that music suddenly disappears from the world, and an average girl, Carol, is summoned to another world to defeat the demon that’s the cause of this. Right away, we run into a number of problems. Is the demon just stealing music, or all sounds? What is the definition of music here? It’s shown taking the sound of Big Ben’s chime, of all things, which I don’t think necessarily constitutes “music.” It’s later shown doing the same to a babbling brook, birds chirping and people laughing. Since that’s the case, wouldn’t it make more sense to say it’s taking all “sound” from the world instead of “music”? Then again, it doesn’t take away every sound, because people can still talk to each other, etc. after these phenomena occur. Other questions that don’t get answered adequately or at all include why Carol is chosen to defeat the demon in the first place, what the antagonists’ motivations are for stealing music, why those other guys get captured by the antagonists, why that one human-looking guy is helping the antagonists, and why Carol hates sweets so much (a recurring theme throughout the OVA). Furthermore, the ending is jarring and confusing, making you wonder if any of the events in the anime actually happened. The whole thing has an “Alice and Wonderland” meets “The Neverending Story” feel, with hints of “Labyrinth” mixed in, but the end product is not as good as any of those titles. None of the characters are likable. Carol, in particular, is rude to just about everyone for no good reason, and she acts like a spoiled brat most of the time. The three main guys range from bland to weird, and don’t really have any distinct personality traits. The human antagonist just seems to be there to fill a role, and doesn’t have much of a personality, either. The demon is a giant ugly one-eyed blob that wakes up, sashays into the main room (it looks like a stage for a dinner show), steals music somehow, and then exits the stage. Then we have some fantasy-type characters like a talking rabbit, a talking tree, and a giant flying dog with a speakerphone jewel on its forehead. Characters tend to do things that make no sense, and say things that no person would actually say in real life. Every interaction in “Carol” thus feels forced and artificial. The majority of the technical aspects are average. The music, which is supposed to be the highlight of this OVA, is just okay, with the ending theme being the piece that stands out the most. There are a number of insert songs throughout the OVA, but their presence isn’t emphasized, so they’re easily forgotten. All of the voice actors are good, with the aforementioned exception of the person voicing Flash, who is the lead singer of TM NETWORK and not a professional voice actor. The animation is fluid, but there are some recycled frames and scenes where characters speak but their lips don’t move. The art is rather plain, especially the backgrounds. The characters were designed by the creator of “Earthian,” so the guys in particular have an otherworldly “pretty-boy” look. Meanwhile, Carol herself doesn’t look that unique. The designs of the monsters/creatures are also generic, perhaps with the exception of the flying dog/phone thing. There’s not much that could be considered objectionable content in this OVA. Some characters die (but you probably won’t feel anything because they weren’t given time to develop), there’s a little bit of human vs. monster violence (the monsters just turn into light and disappear when killed), and that’s about it. There’s a flashing light sequence around a quarter of the way through the OVA, so you may want to watch out for that if you’re photosensitive. Overall, “Carol” had a standard premise that could have been interesting if developed properly, but it ended up like an aimless fever dream instead. This OVA is not particularly enjoyable to watch, either, and I would only recommend it if you’re a fan of TM NETWORK or Yun Koga.

I don't think this anime deserves such a bad rap. Compared to most of the newly released anime, which all feel kind of the same to me, Carol was a nice change of pace. Also, if you like the music from City Hunter, I think you'll like the music in this anime, especially the closing song, since it's made by TM Network (the same guys who sing GET WILD). As of this posting, this anime is available on Youtube. Just search "CAROL OVA 1990". Your Japanese listening skills have to be up there, though. There weren't any subtitles :/ Hope you like it!

Haha this is so messy it's almost worthwhile. Japanese intuition is intriguing, even with bad examples like these. Here we have the Alice in Wonderland template, dissected and thrown against several unripe narratives, mainly evolving around an "album" that works as a portal to another world, though it's partly causing the music from the first world to disappear, pun is seriously not indented lol, that's how it really is, it's actually written based on a real band and album. The premise is engaging indeed, but it feels like a surreal aesthetic mix of "post-punk" from the 80s and dungeon myths, it's even weirder than that if you pay close attention to all the details, plenty of mainstream references too. To add more to the strangeness, the heroine is named Carol while her mean friend is the one named Alice, though the former has the prototype Alice look, she even meets a rabbit in the other world who helps her. This is the part most fascinating to me, as I follow the evolution of the Alice narrative in general. I like though that they turned around the princess saved by a knight stereotype into the complete opposite, the princess is the one who saves the knight, and finally they join to defeat the monster. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you’re weird or consuming magic mushrooms while watching.

Carol is the story of Carol, a typical teenage girl who hates sweet things, wishes people wouldn't treat her like a child and whose one true love is and always will be the fine products made by Sony. One day, the British pop-rock band she likes releases a bad album, and also her father has Musician Angst one time, and so to resolve that she has to go on a magical journey to... do stuff. Something about doing a magic chant at a weird shoggoth monster? I think she talks to a rabbit girl at one point? Carol (the anime, not the teenager with the name the voice actors definitely don't struggle to say) is an anime that wears the skin of a 90's isekai "girl goes on a magical adventure" movie, in the same way a five year old wears their parent's shoes when they pretend to be a grownup. It has all the primary elements of a movie of this kind, but lacks the sort of follow-through that would suggest the writers were doing anything more than checking off a list of common tropes. Contemporary movies of the same genre tended to be based around the main character going on a journey in order to improve themselves as a person, to overcome some flaw that could only be overcome through a parable-laden quest. Carol (the girl) does not do anything like this. As near as I can tell, her only character flaws are that she wants to be treated like an adult (never resolved), she doesn't like to eat sweet things (irrelevant to the plot barring a strange scene where someone guilt-trips her about it), and that she doesn't actually want to go on a magical journey to save the fantasy world she's transported to (which is resolved, I guess, when she later decides she wants to do that?) The main plot of the movie is that the villain, an amorphous blob of eyeballs and tentacles that could have been a monster in literally any anime from the time period, is stealing all the world's music through the use of dark magic. One would think that this would be an anime that has a lot to say about music, considering it's an anime about how awful it would be if music were taken away. As it turns out, however, the creators just don't really seem to care all that much. None of the songs in the film are what I would call break-out hits. Literally the only one I remember is a rendition of "Pictures at an Exhibition" which has the distinction of not only being nothing more than a DAW passed through the cheapest MIDI synthesizer the 90's could buy, but also scoring an absolute filler scene of Carol staring blankly into the camera over footage of a looping laser effect. Music doesn't even heavily factor into the plot. It's not a musical; Carol beats the monster by saying a bunch of magic words with no rhythm or intonation in order to stop a bunch of monsters from saying a bunch of bad magic words that make Big Ben sound like garbage. As far as I can tell, the authors of this anime only picked such a lofty premise because "Monster Who Steals the Concept of Something Poignant" is a common motivation for monsters in fantasy lands from this time period. I continue to call this anime a "movie," but in reality it's nothing more than two standard episodes stapled together. This works tremendously to its detriment, because Carol (the anime) has a feature length film's worth of content that it needs to get to, and a seeming mandate from Corporate that it all be resolved in less than an hour. The plot is comically compressed. Carol (the girl) announces that she won't be getting involved in the plot for seemingly no other reason than because it's what she's supposed to do at that point in the movie. She comes around to the idea of saving all music just as quickly and for seemingly no other motivation. People literally die in front of her on multiple occasions, but because they were given basically no screen-time their loss is as poignant as seeing somebody you waved to in passing in a hallway get on an elevator. At every moment, I can *hear* the writers in the planning room, saying "Okay, so we're at this point in the film. This plot point needs to happen right now, like on this frame. No, I don't care that it hasn't been properly set up. We got ten more items to get through on this checklist before we can ship this and go back to doing blow and playing eroge." Ultimately, Carol (the anime) is... fascinating. Awful, but fascinating. Watching Carol is like seeing the half-constructed skeleton of a skyscraper whose developer ran out of money and abandoned it. An eyesore, and not fit for human habitation, but in being half-finished you can inspect it and get an insight into the process of how it was constructed. That is perhaps worth enough novelty for a watch, and to maybe say that it's not totally worthless. Even so, it's still a bad anime, and anybody looking for a hidden gem should probably keep looking.