Review for Kokoro Connect OVA Collection

Introduction

Kokoro Connect turned out to be quite the surprise last month. From the basic description, I expected merely another high school romantic comedy with a high concept to ensure plenty of awkward moments and mis-communicated feelings. That, plus the whole body swap idea that would ensure that every red blooded male’s hands would venture chestwards, and ever sensitive female would don a gas mask, blindfold, and grab a pair of tongs before daring to head to the bathroom. Any other anime would have delivered on that. Kokoro Connect on the other hand delivered a comedy drama about teenagers forced to confront themselves, and each other with a brutal honesty that most teens get to avoid. It was absolutely gripping stuff, and made Kokoro Connect one of the more notable releases of the year. It’s been a month, and now MVM are bringing us the OVA episodes. And once more I lower my expectations. After all, OVAs are hardly renowned for living up to the standards of the series. Girls und Panzer’s OVA episodes are a case in point, entertaining yes, but goofy and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. It turns out that I was prematurely pessimistic again, as Kokoro Connect’s OVA episodes merely pick up where the series left off, and it continues with the main narrative.


In typical Japanese high school fashion, everyone is expected to join an extracurricular club, but for Taichi Yaegashi (wrestling fan), Yoshifumi Aoki (player), Himeko Inaba (computer club dropout), Yui Kiriyama (fan of all things cute), and Iori Nagase (can’t make up her mind which club to join), there’s no easy fit to any of the school clubs. So they start their own, the Student Cultural Society, which isn’t really about anything at all except hanging out, and producing a newsletter once a month to keep looking productive. Their homeroom teacher, Mr Goto is equally lackadaisical in his approach to his students.


Then one morning Yui and Yoshifumi turn up to the club in a state of distress. They claim they swapped bodies during the night, which is the kind of thing you’d dismiss as a prank, or a weird dream, until Taichi and Iori swap as well, right in the middle of the club meeting, and pretty soon they’re all at it, swapping bodies without warning or explanation. It might be fun, for the first few minutes, but it quickly makes for some very awkward moments and a lot of explaining and apologising to do. And then Mr Goto shows up at their club room, to tell them that they’re going to keep swapping bodies, and he’s going to keep observing them as they do so, until he’s satisfied with his observations. Only he’s not Mr Goto anymore, he’s someone called Heartseed who’ll be borrowing Goto’s body from time to time. They thought they were friends before, but all this body swapping inevitably reveals their intimate secrets to each other, the kind of things you’d never normally tell anyone. It might be therapeutic, or it might just be the worst thing ever.


You might have thought it was all over at the end of the series, that the friends had come to know each other and themselves in a way that would ensure their bonds are rock solid. But Heartseed returns with a new experiment, one that threatens to shatter their friendships irrevocably. Now the trick is that at random, their true feelings will be broadcast to others of their group, the tactless momentary feelings that they keep concealed to avoid hurting the other. And suddenly Iori Nagase is no longer the Iori Nagase that they knew...


Four more episodes of Kokoro Connect are presented on this disc from MVM.

14. Breaking Down, Day By Day
15. See Nothing, Understand Nothing
16. Determination and Resolution
17. Connecting Hearts

Picture

Kokoro Connect gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic native PAL transfer on these discs. The image is clear and sharp throughout, the animation smooth, with no visible artefacting or significant aliasing. Kokoro Connect is a very pleasing anime to watch, produced by studio Silver Link, but possessing something of a KyoAni approach to its character design, keeping them cute and appealing while distinctive and memorable. The world design is stylishly accomplished and it all makes for an attractive whole. Of course it would be more attractive in HD, but this time you’ll have to go the import route for that. The Kokoro Connect OVAs are available on Blu-ray from the US and Australia.

Sound

You get the options of DD 2.0 English and Japanese with subtitles and a signs only track as usual. I went with the Japanese audio and was very happy with the voice actor performances. It isn’t exactly an action filled show, but the dialogue is clear throughout, the music comes across well, and there’s just the right touch of ambience to give the show space. The subtitles are timed accurately and are free of error.

Extras

Kokoro Connect OVA presents its content with a static menu and a jacket picture.

The extras are limited to textless credits and trailers for Little Busters, Arcana Famiglia, Bodacious Space Pirates, and RWBY – Red.

Conclusion

So often OVA episodes are pale shadows of the main series, or inconsequential bits of fluff created after the fact to cash in on the popularity of the franchise. They can be fun, but they often miss out on what really made you like the show in the first place. Not so with the Kokoro Connect OVAs. These four episodes merely pick up where the main series left off, and continue the story. They aren’t constrained by the runtime of TV broadcast schedules, and thus run a little longer than normal, but at no point does the quality of the animation or the storytelling dip. It’s no surprise that they are numbered as episodes 14-17, as they are meant to be watched straight after the TV show.


If there is a difference, it’s that the comedy is toned down a tad, and the character drama becomes a little more important. The series might have ended in a promising place, with a significant drama averted, and the five friends of the Student Cultural Society closer than ever, but as we learn in these episodes, Heartseed’s games aren’t over yet, and his new jape inflicts far greater damage to the friends, especially on Iori. It might have seemed that Iori’s problems were solved at the end of the series, but that really dealt with a surface issue, not what has really been troubling her. And it’s that problem which is explored in these episodes.


All along, Iori has said that her bright disposition is artifice, that she merely presents the world with the face that people expect to see. That’s not usually the kind of statement that people take seriously, and Taichi and the others did assume she was exaggerating or overly dramatising her personality. But when Heartseed’s newest experiment is to randomly pipe their feelings into each other’s minds at the most embarrassing or damaging moments, the strongest application of honesty yet, it becomes clear to Iori that her life in the club, and indeed in school is effectively over, at least the life she had before. What’s the meaning of putting on a bright and bubbly personality after all, when your inner fears, cynicism, low self-esteem, and pessimism is going to be broadcast to your friends anyway? She quite naturally starts to withdraw from her friends because of this and she becomes depressed and sullen in class, to the point that everyone else starts to mistrust her, call her a fake.


When Taichi, Inaba, Yui and Aoki do what they’ve done on previous occasions because of Heartseed, determine to help Iori through her problem, get her back to the Iori that she was before, and the random emotion transmission makes their determination clear to Iori, that’s like sticking the knife in, as it seems that they only want the ‘fake’ Iori facade, and not who she really is. If all this isn’t enough, Taichi’s in the middle of a love crisis that’s been brewing since the series, his fledgling relationship with Iori is already on the rocks because of the latest Heartseed crisis, and Inaba’s feelings for him also become painfully obvious at this point. And that’s another burden that Iori simply doesn’t need at this point.


Kokoro Connect really blew me away with the approach it took to telling its character stories, the inventive and rewarding way that it developed, what in lesser hands could have been a prurient premise. The Kokoro Connect OVAs simply continue that sterling storytelling and character development. If you bought the series, these OVAs are essential, and they’re just as good as the series. After all, it’s all one story!