Ai Yori Aoshi

Kaoru Hanabishi offers to help a lost girl in a kimono who seems very out of place in Tokyo, only to discover that the address she is looking for is an empty lot. She is eventually revealed as Aoi Sakuraba, a rich girl from a traditional family, who was betrothed to Kaoru in childhood. Although their engagement has been broken off on a technicality to do with Kaoru's unfilial behavior, Aoi insists on honoring her side of the deal. While Kaoru wrestles with whether he should take up Aoi's offer, this Stepford wannabe bustles around the house performing every conjugal duty except consummation. Ko Fumizuki's manga in Young Animal magazine set up a premise that could have been a fascinating meditation on the changing role of the family and tradition among Japanese youth, but instead turns into Tenchi Muyo!, as a group of gorgeous girls home in on Kaoru like the Japanese Self Defense Force chasing Godzilla. Meanwhile, Aoi is still so eager to please her fiancé that she lets Kaoru and all his would-be girlfriends live in her family's summer house.

Goodness knows how Masaharu Amiya has the temerity to claim his "series concept" credit, but for every generation of pubescent boys with romantic yearnings there is a new Tenchi clone. This one, like its heroine, is ravishingly pretty and well-mannered, and like its hero, it has its moments and is often more endurable than its fellow shows, but still doesn't know when to quit-a second season followed in 2003 as AYA: Destiny (AYA-Enishi). The DVD release of each series had a bonus episode: the 5-minute picnic tale AYA Dream Story for series one, and the 15-minute Christmas fantasy episode AYA Beautiful Snow (AYA Miyuki) for series two.

The title is half of a translation of a Chinese proverb: "Qing qu yu lan…" (Blue comes from indigo) which is completed by the phrase "…er sheng yu lan" (but is superior to it). The phrase alludes to the manufacture of dyes, but is used in China to imply that a pupil can, and should, surpass his teacher. In this case, it is presumably meant to suggest that we should rise above the situation in which we find ourselves-fighting words for creators who are handed a touching love story, but merely use it to rehash a paradigm established more than two decades earlier in Urusei Yatsura. A Chinese TV series with the same title, shown on TVB, has no relation to the anime, and has been referred to as Shine on You in English. N