Hand Maid May
The sentimental comedy is a genre that has accompanied every step of the evolution of Japanese animation: if the previous generation loved "Kimagure Orange Road" or "Video Girl Ai" (the very first manga of the post-Granata Press era) modern fans have fantasized about series such as "Love Hina" or "Chobits".
But every kind of success leads to a great proliferation of clone titles, and quality series like those mentioned are often accompanied by hordes of uninspired anime and manga that only march on the usual stereotypes. So let's see the value of "Hand Maid May", among the revived DVDs of the old VHS Dynit catalogue.
Kazuya Saotome, an engineering student, lives in a tiny and messy apartment in the condominium managed by the busty Kasumi. Between one lesson and another, he carries on the ambitious Doraemon project: Kazuya aims to create an automaton equipped with real artificial intelligence, like the famous robot cat of the anime from which he took the name of his project.
For now however, after 37 failures, he has only managed to create a robot that looks like a funny cuttlefish, which he called Ikariya, and which is certainly not very bright. Kazuya is as skilled in engineering as he is naive in life: in fact, he accepts without batting an eyelid a dvd-rom from Kotaro Nanbara, his caricatured friend (or according to Kotaro, "eternal rival") which should contain very useful material for the progress of the Doraemon project. Obviously the DVD actually contains a virus, which Kazuya is unable to counter and which leads his PC to connect to the Cyberdine website, a totally unknown company, and to make a mysterious online order...
Only a few minutes pass and the doorbell rings: a small package is delivered to Kazuya, from which a little voice soon comes out complaining about how bad it is in there! Inside the box, there is little May: a "cyberdoll" as she defines herself, dressed as a waitress and in all respects similar to a human being (she can even eat!) apart from the dimensions... which are limited about thirty centimetres. The cyberdoll will prove to be nice, adorable and full of good will, even if its small size makes even the simplest task difficult: but the problems will soon begin. Cyberdine asks for a "rather" steep payment for May, equal to about one and a half million dollars.. and faced with the obvious impossibility for a simple student to pay such an enormous amount, it will start sending other cyberdolls (this time of human) to recover May.
This is the incipit of "Hand Maid May", and it's easy to guess that there's not much new under the sun. In many ways the whole thing reminds us of the much more successful "Chobits", which however "Hand Maid May" is prior to. The most innovative factor is the small size of the protagonist, for the rest we are faced with many of the stereotypes of sentimental comedies: a fairly flat male protagonist who nonetheless arouses the interest of rivers of splendid girls, misunderstandings, tons of super deformed and a careful direction to provide us quite often with a good dose of fanservice, in the form of bouncing breasts or panties in full view. In the midst of so much "already seen", a real star stands out: Kotaro Nanbara, one of the most brilliant cartoons I've ever seen in years of anime. His absurd clothing that seems stolen from the Joker's closet, his lanky movements and his incessant gab cannot fail to steal a smile from even the most impatient of spectators.
The character design is inspired and also in line with the productions of the genre: Kazuya is therefore absolutely silly, May and her cute companions the apotheosis of kawaii, and Kotaro Nanbara that of madness: the beautiful drawings are animated in a fluid and without falling in tone, perhaps thanks to the short duration of the series, of only 10 episodes. The soundtrack accompanies the anime with cute and catchy motifs, but which will disappear from your memory as soon as you take the DVD out of the player. The opening and closing theme songs are much more inspired.
The Italian edition makes use of a generally very good video quality, but penalized in some (fortunately short) sequences by a slight loss of definition. The sound, on the other hand, is always clean, and the menus are nice and beautiful to look at and navigate, with a background that replicates the printed circuits of PC components. The dubbing is of a good standard, and here too Kotaro Nanbara stands out: Christian Iansante (Kuno in the OVA of "Ranma 1/2") provides an exceptional and hilarious performance, to which we owe much of the character's charisma. With little surprise, however, we note the poverty of the extras, which apart from the character sheets (curiously accompanied by a short multiple-question quiz on each of them) offer us nothing worthy of note.
Ultimately we are faced with a sentimental comedy like many others: it can satisfy fans of the genre and will elicit more than a smile from them, but probably if there was an Italian edition of the anime of "Chobits" "Hand Maid May" would not have reason to exist.
